Page:The Other House (London, William Heinemann, 1896), Volume 2.djvu/159

Rh iteration: "What makes your tremendous need? what makes your tremendous need?"—he spoke as if that tone were the way of safety. "I don't in the least see why it should have taken such a jump. You must do justice, even after your act of this afternoon—a demonstration far greater than any I dreamed of asking of you—you must do justice to my absolute necessity for seeing everything clear. I didn't there in the garden see anything clear at all—I was only startled and wonder-struck and puzzled. Certainly I was touched, as you say—I was so touched that I particularly suffered. But I couldn't pretend I was satisfied or gratified, or even that I was particularly convinced. You often failed of old, I know, to give me what I really wanted from you, and yet it never prevented the success of your effect on—what shall I call it?" He stopped short. "On God knows what baser, obscurer part of me! I'm not such a brute as to say," he quickly went on, "that that effect was not produced this afternoon"

"You confine yourself to saying," Rose interrupted, "that it's not produced in our actual situation."