Virginia Woolf: Night and Day

23. CHAPTER XXIII (continued)

"I deny that I should cease to feel this if I knew you," he went on. "I should feel it more reasonably--that's all. I shouldn't talk the kind of nonsense I've talked to-night. . . . But it wasn't nonsense. It was the truth," he said doggedly. "It's the important thing. You can force me to talk as if this feeling for you were an hallucination, but all our feelings are that. The best of them are half illusions. Still," he added, as if arguing to himself, "if it weren't as real a feeling as I'm capable of, I shouldn't be changing my life on your account."

"What do you mean?" she inquired.

"I told you. I'm taking a cottage. I'm giving up my profession."

"On my account?" she asked, in amazement.

"Yes, on your account," he replied. He explained his meaning no further.

"But I don't know you or your circumstances," she said at last, as he remained silent.

"You have no opinion about me one way or the other?"

"Yes, I suppose I have an opinion--" she hesitated.

He controlled his wish to ask her to explain herself, and much to his pleasure she went on, appearing to search her mind.

"I thought that you criticized me--perhaps disliked me. I thought of you as a person who judges--"

"No; I'm a person who feels," he said, in a low voice.

"Tell me, then, what has made you do this?" she asked, after a break.