Page 154 - women-in-love

ble about him, and he did not want the onus of this. So at the
station, he wrote saying:
I will go on to town—I don’t want to come back to
Breadalby for the present. But it is quite all right—I don’t
want you to mind having biffed me, in the least. Tell the
others it is just one of my moods. You were quite right, to
biff me—because I know you wanted to. So there’s the end
of it.
In the train, however, he felt ill. Every motion was insuf-
ferable pain, and he was sick. He dragged himself from the
station into a cab, feeling his way step by step, like a blind
man, and held up only by a dim will.
For a week or two he was ill, but he did not let Hermione
know, and she thought he was sulking; there was a complete
estrangement between them. She became rapt, abstracted
in her conviction of exclusive righteousness. She lived in
and by her own self-esteem, conviction of her own right-
ness of spirit.

154 Women in Love