“You seem to me cruelly unfair,” he said.
“No! no! I’m not unfair! You know I’m not!” she cried. “You always saw the truth about her—from the very beginning. You never fell down and worshipped her, like the rest of us. And she knew that you were her enemy and warned us against you. Oh—why did Barney marry her!”
“I never worshipped her; but I never thought her base and hateful.”
“You never knew her as I did; that was all. And I never knew her until I came back and found her doing to Palgrave what she had done to us. Paladin! Did you hear her call him Paladin? Always flattery! Always to make one think one was wonderful, important, mysterious! She forced us to go away, Roger. Sometimes I think it was hypnotism; that she uses her will-power consciously. We did not want to go. We did not want the divorce and the scandal.”
“What did you want, then, Meg?”
She felt the gravity of his tone but, like a fierce Maenad, she snatched at the torch, not caring how it revealed her. “What of it! What if we had been secret lovers! Who would have known! Who would have been harmed! Some people go on for years and years. His wife loved another man. He had no one. Why should we have been pushed—such pitiful fools we were—into displaying our love to the world and being crushed by it! Oh, he was so loyal, so brave; but it made him very, very unhappy. Oh, I was cruel to him sometimes! I used to reproach him sometimes! Oh, Roger! Roger!—” She broke into wild tears and stumbled to her feet.
As she reached the door, covering her face with her hands, her mother opened it and, meeting her on the threshold, Meg, with almost the effect of beating her aside with the other impediments to her rage and grief, pushed past her so that the knitting Mrs. Chadwick held was flung to the floor, the ball of khaki wool running rapidly away under a sofa and the socks and needles dangling at her feet.
She stood looking down at them with a curious apathy and, as Oldmeadow went to help and greet her, he saw that as much as Meg was wild she was dulled and quiet.
“Meg is so very, very violent,” she said, as he disentangled the wool and restored her sock and ball to her. She spoke with listlessness rather than sympathy.
“Poor child,” said Oldmeadow. “One can hardly wonder at it. But it makes a wretched existence for you, I’m afraid. You and she oughtn’t to be alone together.”