There was a beaten look in his face, a very different look
from that which had startled her when he came into her room after
thrashing Leo Ulford. This time, however, her curiosity was not awake,
and the fact that it was not awake marked a change in her. She felt
to-day as if she did not care what Fritz had been doing or was going to
do. She had suffered, she had concealed her suffering, she had tried
vulgarly to pay Fritz out, she had failed. At the critical moment she had
played the woman after he had played the man. He had thrashed the
intruder whom she was using as a weapon, and she had bathed his wounds,
made much of him, idealised him. She had done what any uneducated street
woman would have done for "her man." And now she had suddenly come to
feel as if there had always been an emptiness in her life, as if Fritz
never had, never could fill it. The abruptness of the onset of this new
feeling confused her. She did not know that a woman could be subject to a
change of this kind. She did not understand it, realise what it
portended, what would result from it. But she felt that, for the moment,
at any rate, she could not get up any excitement about Fritz, his
feelings, his doings. Whenever she thought of him she thought of his
blundering stupidity, his blindness, sensuality and egoism. No doubt she
loved him. Only, to-day, she did not feel as if she loved him or anyone.
Yet she did not feel dull.
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