"I
wish I had been too. But I was alone out in the world, the horrid world,
that very world which had used you so badly."
"And you couldn't go about in it without finding somebody to fall in love
with?" he said. A jealous rage affected his brain like the fumes of
wine, rising from some secret depths of his being so long deprived of all
emotions. The hollows at the corners of his lips became more pronounced
in the puffy roundness of his cheeks. Images, visions, obsess with
particular force, men withdrawn from the sights and sounds of active
life. "And I did nothing but think of you!" he exclaimed under his
breath, contemptuously. "Think of you! You haunted me, I tell you."
Flora said to herself that there was a being who loved her. "Then we
have been haunting each other," she declared with a pang of remorse. For
indeed he had haunted her nearly out of the world, into a final and
irremediable desertion. "Some day I shall tell you . . . No. I don't
think I can ever tell you. There was a time when I was mad. But what's
the good? It's all over now.
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