She faltered, "I'm so sorry, Roly."
Her tone pricked him. But these men hate above all things to feel in the wrong when they are in the wrong. The effect of her humility was to make him explain: "I don't know what possessed you, Audrey, 'pon my soul I don't, to go palling up with that woman."
Again she blundered. His reproach was so absurd that she laughed quite naturally at it: "O Roly! how ridiculous! How was I to know you knew her?"
He turned on her, alarming her utterly. "You ought to have known!"
Foolish, exasperating tears in her eyes: "How could I? How could I?"
"I've told you—I've warned you; that's what I mean. I've told you that every dashed soul I ever knew seems to be all over the Continent. I've warned you to be careful. Asked you not to get in with people. You absolutely don't care, seems to me. Perhaps you think it funny dodging about like this—perhaps you enjoy it. Well, I don't. That's enough. Let's drop the subject."
IV
So and in this wise the miserable business jolted towards its climax; deeper blunders at every step and every blunder additional to the load that stumbled them into the next. Here was a young man that had taken to himself pleasures, and lo! they were chains, rattling whensoever he moved most grimly to remind him that now limits were imposed upon his movements; that he who, by virtue of his rank, of the blood in his veins, of his own high, careless, fearless air, that he who by virtue of these was wont to look every man in the face more boldly than the most of us, must now hide, dodge, shift, dissemble, or betray the secret that, as to his torment he found, every day and every covering deception made more impossible to discover to the world.
Of all mankind's infirmities nothing than deception so quickly, so deeply and so surely turns the quality of his behaviour; nothing so cruelly tears, so acidly pierces his nerves; nothing so saps his resolution, destroys his moral fibre. Honesty is sword and armour, bread and wine; deception a voracious canker in the vitals, a clutch out of hell dragging through fog of fear, through slough of sin, into mire unspeakable. He was in its torments, he was writhing from them into deeper blunders; he began to shudder at the thought of proclaiming his marriage—yet.
She saw his plight and, all unschooled in life, she contributed to the disaster. Here was the gentlest creature, adoring and mated with an impetuous mate that now was as a free beast trapped, goaded by the sudden bars that caged him on every side, wildly seeking an outlet, panicked at finding none. She searched her miserable pamphlet of "I love," stained now with tears. It had nothing to give her. She read into it that in marrying her Roly she thought to have brought him nectar, and lo! it was a cup of poison she had given him, tormenting him utterly. She blamed herself. Through wakeful nights she watched him where he lay beside her—troubled often now in his sleep—and sought and sought, fumbling her pamphlet, to know what amends she could make him; and chid herself she was a burden to him; and would sit up in the darkness and wring her poor young hands in her distracted grief.