I did not answer; the illustration was too abominably just.  It was just that.  There were even now all these people—­these Legitimists—­sneering ineffectually; shutting themselves away from the light in their mournful houses and suffering horribly because everything that they stood for had gone under.

“But even if I believe you,” I said, “the thing is too horrible, and your tools are too mean; that man who has just gone out and—­and Callan—­are they the weapons of the inevitable?  After all, the Revolution ...”  I was striving to get back to tangible ideas—­ideas that one could name and date and label ... “the Revolution was noble in essence and made for good.  But all this of yours is too vile and too petty.  You are bribing, or something worse, that man to betray his master.  And that you call helping on the inevitable....”

“They used to say just that of the Revolution.  That wasn’t nice of its tools.  Don’t you see?  They were the people that went under....  They couldn’t see the good....”

“And I—­I am to take it on trust,” I said, bitterly.

“You couldn’t see the good,” she answered, “it isn’t possible, and there is no way of explaining.  Our languages are different, and there’s no bridge—­no bridge at all.  We can’t meet....”

It was that revolted me.  If there was no bridge and we could not meet, we must even fight; that is, if I believed her version of herself.  If I did not, I was being played the fool with.  I preferred to think that.  If she were only fooling me she remained attainable.  If it was as she said, there was no hope at all—­not any.

“I don’t believe you,” I said, suddenly.  I didn’t want to believe her.  The thing was too abominable—­too abominable for words, and incredible.  I struggled against it as one struggles against inevitable madness, against the thought of it.  It hung over me, stupefying, deadening.  One could only fight it with violence, crudely, in jerks, as one struggles against the numbness of frost.  It was like a pall, like descending clouds of smoke, seemed to be actually present in the absurdly lofty room—­this belief in what she stood for, in what she said she stood for.

“I don’t believe you,” I proclaimed, “I won’t....  You are playing the fool with me ... trying to get round me ... to make me let you go on with these—­with these—­It is abominable.  Think of what it means for me, what people are saying of me, and I am a decent man—­You shall not.  Do you understand, you shall not.  It is unbearable ... and you ... you try to fool me ... in order to keep me quiet ...”

“Oh, no,” she said.  “Oh, no.”

She had an accent that touched grief, as nearly as she could touch it.  I remember it now, as one remembers these things.  But then I passed it over.  I was too much moved myself to notice it more than subconsciously, as one notices things past which one is whirled.  And I was whirled past these things, in an ungovernable fury at the remembrance of what I had suffered, of what I had still to suffer.  I was speaking with intense rage, jerking out words, ideas, as floodwater jerks through a sluice the debris of once ordered fields.