Still, I knew it wouldn't do. Curious
thing--all the while that my mind was telling me how my whole
existence had unfitted me to be a wife to such a man--for Charlie
Mills is as full of romantic illusions as a seventeen-year-old
girl--at the same time some queer streak in me made me long to wipe
the slate clean and start all over again. But I could never convince
myself that it was anything more than sex in me responding to the
passion that so deeply moved him. That suspicion became certainty at
last. That is why I say Charlie Mills taught me something about
myself."
"I think it was a dear lesson for him," Hollister said, remembering
the man's moods and melancholy, the bitterness of frustration which
must have torn Mills. "You hurt him."
"I know it, and I'm sorry, but I couldn't help it," she said
patiently. "There was a time just about a year ago when I very nearly
went away with him. I think he felt that I was yielding. But I was
trying to be honest with myself and with him. With all my vagaries, my
uncertain emotions, I didn't want just the excitement of an affair, an
amorous adventure.
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