"Is that an allusion to what--by the loss of your beautiful presence--I've failed to 'gain'?
I dare say at any rate"-- she gave him no time to reply--"that you feel you're quite as straightforward as I and that we're neither of us creatures of mere rash impulse.

There was a time in fact, wasn't there?
when we rather enjoyed each other's dim depths.

If I wanted to fawn on you," she went on, "I might say that, with such a comrade in obliquity to wind and double about with, I'd risk losing myself in the mine.

But why retort or recriminate?
Let us not, for God's sake, be vulgar--we haven't yet, bad as it is, come to THAT.

I CAN be, no doubt--I some day MUST be: I feel it looming at me out of the awful future as an inevitable fate.