Alice Munros Best

door. She held her arms across her stomach, and rocked back and forth.
    “What is it, Rose? What’s the matter? Are you sick?”
    “It’s just so hard to tell you!”
    “Tell me what?”
    “What I just did tell you!”
    “I mean have you found out you have to or something?”
    “No!”
    “Is there something in your family you haven’t told me about? Insanity?” said Patrick encouragingly.
    “No!” Rose rocked and wept.
    “So what is it?”
    “I don’t love you!” she said. “I don’t love you. I don’t love you.” She fell on the bed and put her head in the pillow. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I can’t help it.”
    After a moment or two Patrick said, “Well. If you don’t love me you don’t love me. I’m not forcing you to.” His voice sounded strained and spiteful, against the reasonableness of what he was saying. “I just wonder,” he said, “if you know what you do want. I don’t think you do. I don’t think you have any idea what you want. You’re just in a state.”
    “I don’t have to know what I want to know what I don’t want!” Rose said, turning over. This released her. “I never loved you.”
    “Shh. You’ll wake them. We have to stop.”
    “I never loved you. I never wanted to. It was a mistake.”
    “All right. All right. You made your point.”
    “Why am I supposed to love you? Why do you act as if there was something wrong with me if I didn’t? You despise me. You despise my family and my background and you think you are doing me a
great favor
–”
    “I fell in love with you,” Patrick said. “I don’t despise you. Oh, Rose. I worship you.”
    “You’re a sissy,” Rose said. “You’re a prude.” She jumped off the bed with great pleasure as she said this. She felt full of energy. More was coming. Terrible things were coming.
    “You don’t even know how to make love right. I always wanted to get out of this from the very first. I felt sorry for you. You won’t look where you’re going, you’re always knocking things over, just because you can’t be bothered, you can’t be bothered noticing anything, you’re wrapped up in yourself, and you’re always bragging, it’s so stupid, you don’t even know how to brag right, if you really want to impress people you’ll never do it, the way you do it all they do is laugh at you!”
    Patrick sat on the bed and looked up at her, his face open to whatever she would say. She wanted to beat and beat him, to say worse and worse, uglier and crueller, things. She took a breath, drew in air, to stop the things she felt rising in her from getting out.
    “I don’t want to see you, ever!” she said viciously. But at the door she turned and said in a normal and regretful voice, “Goodbye.”
    PATRICK WROTE HER a note:
I don’t understand what happened the other day and I want to talk to you about it. But I think we should wait for two weeks and not see or talk to each other and find out how we feel at the end of that time.
    Rose had forgotten all about giving him back his ring. When she came out of his apartment building that morning she was still wearing it. She couldn’t go back, and it seemed too valuable to send through the mail. She continued to wear it, mostly because she did not want to have to tell Dr. Henshawe what had happened. She was relieved to get Patrick’s note. She thought that she could give him back the ring then.
    She thought about what Patrick had said about Dr. Henshawe. No doubt there was some truth in that, else why should she be so reluctant to tell Dr. Henshawe she had broken her engagement, so unwilling to face her sensible approval, her restrained, relieved congratulations?
    She told Dr. Henshawe that she was not seeing Patrick while she studied for her exams. Rose could see that even that pleased her.
    She told no one that her situation had changed. It was not just Dr. Henshawe she didn’t want knowing. She didn’t like giving up being envied; the experience was so new to her.
    She tried to think what to do next. She could not stay on at Dr. Henshawe’s. It seemed clear that if she escaped from Patrick, she must escape from Dr. Henshawe too. And she did not want to stay on at the college, with people knowing about her broken engagement, with the girls who now congratulated her saying they had known all along it was a fluke, her getting Patrick. She would have to get a job.
    The Head Librarian had offered her a job for the summer but that was perhaps at Dr.