"Mary, do you remember that vacation I took suddenly, after telling you that night—just before you left? You knew, didn't you?"
"Yes. I knew. I would have stayed, Jean, only it wouldn't have done any good."
"No. I was glad you weren't there. It made it easier, in a way. And I was glad when Pat went, too, and the children. I had only to deceive mummy, then—and keep going." Jean stopped and Mary smoked two cigarettes before she began again.
"And then mummy died and there was no need to pretend any more, no need for anything. Mary, it wasn't true that I came West for a vacation. I didn't come to see you. I came to leave it all. I let go."
There was another long pause, before Jean went on.
"I had loved a man so that his going took all the meaning out of life. And I went on for a while through a kind of inertia and because, from a baby, mummy had beaten a sense of duty into me. It was no force of my own. I had jumped into a stream, and when the current was too strong for my strength I went down, just as Franklin and Flop and The Kitten, and all those whom I used to despise, went down when their particular current was too strong for them. Why, on the night I got Gregory's letter, if I could have gone to him I would have. I would have had it all back, under any conditions, at any price. Nothing mattered, nothing in the whole world, but to feel his arms about me, to know that it had not finished. I would have gone to her, just as The Kitten came, and asked her to give him to me."
"But you didn't, Jean."
"No. Because something in me, that I hated for its clearness, saw that if it had been to him what it had been to me, he would never have written that letter. I had had nothing, Mary, or such a little part of what I had believed I had."
Jean shivered. Mary's hand moved to comfort, but did not.
"And then, this afternoon, when Franklin said I had had everything, and I saw him sitting there heavier and coarsened and so empty—Mary, he's so tragically empty—it came to me suddenly that I had had a lot. I have always had friendship, Pat and you, and unshakeable love like mummy's, and I had those wonderful months with Gregory, and not even the ending of it can really take them away, and I wanted to give Franklin something, so I told him that I had loved a married man and that we had never been legally married."