“Lest a worse thing might befall.  Come, don’t let us waste in explanations the few minutes we have left.  Give me a kiss.”

“Then you are going to leave me again.  Oh, Sidney—­”

“Never mind to-morrow, Hetty.  Be like the sun and the meadow, which are not in the least concerned about the coming winter.  Why do you stare at that cursed canal, blindly dragging its load of filth from place to place until it pitches it into the sea—­just as a crowded street pitches its load into the cemetery?  Stare at me, and give me a kiss.”

She gave him several, and said coaxingly, with her arm still upon his shoulder:  “You only talk that way to frighten me, Sidney; I know you do.”

“You are the bright sun of my senses,” he said, embracing her.  “I feel my heart and brain wither in your smile, and I fling them to you for your prey with exultation.  How happy I am to have a wife who does not despise me for doing so—­who rather loves me the more!”

“Don’t be silly,” said Henrietta, smiling vacantly.  Then, stung by a half intuition of his meaning, she repulsed him and said angrily, “You despise me.”

“Not more than I despise myself.  Indeed, not so much; for many emotions that seem base from within seem lovable from without.”

“You intend to leave me again.  I feel it.  I know it.”

“You think you know it because you feel it.  Not a bad reason, either.”

“Then you are going to leave me?”

“Do you not feel it and know it?  Yes, my cherished Hetty, I assuredly am.”

She broke into wild exclamations of grief, and he drew her head down and kissed her with a tender action which she could not resist, and a wry face which she did not see.

“My poor Hetty, you don’t understand me.”

“I only understand that you hate me, and want to go away from me.”

“That would be easy to understand.  But the strangeness is that I love you and want to go away from you.  Not for ever.  Only for a time.”

“But I don’t want you to go away.  I won’t let you go away,” she said, a trace of fierceness mingling with her entreaty.  “Why do you want to leave me if you love me?”

“How do I know?  I can no more tell you the whys and wherefores of myself than I can lift myself up by the waistband and carry myself into the next county, as some one challenged a speculator in perpetual motion to do.  I am too much a pessimist to respect my own affections.  Do you know what a pessimist is?”

“A man who thinks everybody as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.”

“So, or thereabout.  Modern English polite society, my native sphere, seems to me as corrupt as consciousness of culture and absence of honesty can make it.  A canting, lie-loving, fact-hating, scribbling, chattering, wealth-hunting, pleasure-hunting, celebrity-hunting mob, that, having lost the fear of hell, and not replaced it by the love of justice, cares for nothing but the lion’s share of the wealth wrung by threat of starvation from the hands of the classes that create it.  If you interrupt me with a silly speech, Hetty, I will pitch you into the canal, and die of sorrow for my lost love afterwards.  You know what I am, according to the conventional description:  a gentleman with lots of money.  Do you know the wicked origin of that money and gentility?”