"I can't think what you wanted with me. Why couldn't you have let me alone!"
Her own voice, steady and hard. "If you feel dirty, go and wash yourself outside. Don't try and rub it off on me. I want to keep clean."
"Isn't it a bit too late?"
"Not if you clear out at once. This minute." He called her "a cruel little devil."
She could forgive him for that. She could forgive him ending it in any beastly way he liked, provided he did end it. But not last night. To come crawling back, three months after, wanting to begin again. Thinking it was possible.
There had been nothing worse than that. Except that one dreadful minute last year when he had wanted to raise her salary--afterwards--and she had said "What for?" And their faces had turned from each other, flaming with the fire of her refusal.
What had he really thought of her? Did he think she wanted to get anything out of their passion? What could you want to get out of it, or give, but joy? Pure joy. Beauty.
At the bend of the road the trees parted. A slender blue channel of sky flowed overhead between the green tops.
If not joy, then truth; reality. The clear reality of yourself, Charlotte Redhead. Of Gibson Herbert. Even now it would be all right so long as you knew what it was and didn't lie about it.
That evening in the office when he came to her--she could remember the feeling that shot up suddenly and ran over her and shook her brain, making her want him to take her in his arms. It was that. It had never been anything but that. She had wanted him to take her, and he knew it. Only, if he hadn't come to her and looked at her she wouldn't have thought of it; she would have gone on working for him without thinking. That was what he didn't know, what he wouldn't have believed if you had told him.
She had come to the top of the hill. At the crossroads she saw the grey front of her inn, the bow window jutting, small black shining panes picked out with the clean white paint of the frame-work.
Upstairs their breakfast table stood in the window bow as they had left it. Bread he had broken on the greasy plate. His cup with the coffee he couldn't drink. Pathetic, if you hadn't remembered.
"You might as well. If it isn't you, it'll be another woman, Sharlie. If it isn't me, it'll be another man."