Page:Conflict (1927).pdf/302

 it is possible. One or the other of us must go away.'

'But how, and when, and where?'

'Of course, you can't go,' she smiled, 'you'd be miserable and unhappy without your work. Besides, you're too big and important a man here, doing big and important things. If you should go away everybody would wonder and want to know why. But I—I'm nothing—nobody. If I should disappear no one would wonder, or want to know why. It's I who must go away, Roger.'

'Oh, Sheilah, in a little time, with a little patience I can arrange things so that what we feel for each other can be acknowledged. Why do you try to kill so beautiful a thing so insistent upon living?'

'Because other beautiful things would have to die to let it live,' promptly she replied, as she had often before. 'And besides,' bluntly she went on, 'it isn't right, and you know it isn't, and I know it isn't, according to our standards, and because in that case it wouldn't be beautiful, and we wouldn't be happy.'

'Then why can't we go on as we are for a little while?'

'Because it hurts too much. The joy I used to feel in being with you for short periods—seeing you, and talking with you, and touching you just a little—is gone now, swallowed up in a terrible desire to be with you all the time, and entirely.'

He groped for her hand, 'Oh, I know. I know.'