"They were not mine," she said in a low, embarrassed voice.

"Whose then?"

"Yours. I never considered them mine.... As though I were a girl of

little consideration ... who paid herself, philosophically, for what

she had lost.... Like a man's mistress after the inevitable break has

come--"

"Don't say that!"

She shrugged her pretty shoulders: "I am a woman old enough to know

what the world is, and what women do in it sometimes; and what men

do.... And I am this sort of woman, Clive: I can give, I can receive,

too, but only because of the happiness it bestows on the giver. And

when the sympathy which must exist between giver and receiver ends,

then also possession ends, for me.... Why do you look at me so

seriously?"

But he dared not say. And presently she went on, happily, and at

random: "Of course I kept Hafiz and the first thing you ever gave

me--the gun-metal wrist-watch. Here it is--" leaning across him and

pulling out a drawer in her dresser. "I wear it every day when I am

out. It keeps excellent time. Isn't it a darling, Clive?"

He examined it in silence, nodded, and returned it to her. And she

laid it away again, saying: "So you think of taking my old apartment? How odd! And how very

sentimental of you, Clive."

He said, forcing a light tone: "Nothing has ever been disturbed there.

It's all as it was when you left. Even your gowns are hanging in the

closets--"

"Clive!"

"We'll go around if you like. Would you care to see it again?"

"Y--yes."

"Then we'll go together, and you can investigate closets and bureaus

and dressers--"

"Clive! Why did you let those things remain?"

"I didn't care to have anybody else take that place."

"Do you know that what you have done is absurdly and frightfully

sentimental?"

"Is it?" he said, trying to laugh. "Well that snivelling and false

sort of sentiment is about the best that such men as I know how to

comfort themselves with--when it's too late for the real thing."

"What do you mean?"

"Just what I am saying. Cheap minds are fed with false sentiment; and

are comforted.... I made out of that place a smug little monument to

you--while you were living alone and almost penniless in a shabby

rooming house on--"

"Oh, Clive! You didn't know that! And anyway it would not have altered

things for me."




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