"When he was dead, what was I to do? I thought I should sing. But my father was coming from the East with another suitor, the prince. The prince had seen me here and there for a couple of years. I had always been known as Madam Fulton. I called myself so at first, proudly, honestly. Then other people called me so, and even when I had left him, I let them do it. Peter stepped in then, honest Peter in his ignorance. He wondered why I didn't come here to Tom's people. Electra was a kind of goddess. I came. That is all." She paused.
Osmond spoke musingly.
"So you were not his wife! And Electra knew it."
"She did not know it."
"But she suspected it. She refused to own you."
"She suspected me because she knew Tom too well. I believe he had shocked her and frightened her until his world was all evil to her. There was another reason." This was a woman's reason, and she was ashamed to have put her finger on it. Electra's proud possession of her lover and her instant revolt at his new partisanship, what was it but crude jealousy? Yet there were many things she could not even dimly understand in Electra's striving and abortive life—the emulation that reached so far and met the mists and vapors at the end. "But there was one thing I did not want," Rose cried—"their money. I never thought of it. I only thought how I might come here for a little and be at peace, away from my father. Then when Electra hated me, I had to stay, I had to fight it out. Why? I don't know. I had to. But now it's all different."
"How is it different?"
"Because she has accepted me."
"But you wanted her to accept you."
"Ah, yes, on my own word! I believe I had it in my mind to tell her the next minute,—to throw myself on her mercy, the mercy of the goddess, and beg her to see me as I was, all wrong, but innocent. It is innocent to have meant no wrong. But when she met me like an enemy, I had to fight."