Seeing she was not going to reply, he continued, almost bitterly, giving himself away:
‘I can’t say it is love I have to offer — and it isn’t love I want. It is something much more impersonal and harder — and rarer.’
There was a silence, out of which she said:
‘You mean you don’t love me?’
She suffered furiously, saying that.
‘Yes, if you like to put it like that. Though perhaps that isn’t true. I don’t know. At any rate, I don’t feel the emotion of love for you — no, and I don’t want to. Because it gives out in the last issues.’
‘Love gives out in the last issues?’