“Sufficient for him, yes. I gave him only half the truth—I should not have minded, you know, had you given him the whole.”
“I should have minded.”
“You? Why should you mind? It was my fault—the whole truth could tell him nothing less than that,” said Camelia quickly.
“I appreciate your generosity”—Perior laughed a little—“that really is generous.” It really was. He put another mark against himself; but a perception of his own past injustice did not weaken him.
“You know why,” she said, and her eyes were now solemn; “you know that I don’t care about myself any longer—so long as you care. That is all that makes any difference—now. So you might have told him had you wished.”
“I didn’t want to;” Perior leaned back against the writing-table, feeling a certain shrinking. Camelia’s power took on new attributes. He could but recognize a baleful nobility in her self-immolation. After all, the falseness of yesterday had held a great sincerity—though the sincerity might only be a morbid folly. He had hardly the excuse of blindness. With a renewed pang of self-disgust he saw that his more subtle falseness to her was a weapon in her hand. She had not turned it against him. Perhaps she did not realize her need. He was glad, by lowering himself, to lift her.
She had come forward into the fuller light, and her face, more clearly revealed, showed the stress that Arthur had seen as a resolute woe. In a pause at a little distance from him, in the very tension of her face, Perior saw that she stooped to no weak appeal; it was an intelligent demand, rather, that he should recognize and do her justice.
“I know how angry you are with me,” she said, after the slight pause in which they studied one another. “You believe that I have acted badly; and so I have. I see it too. I entrapped you, made you feel false to him, made you feel that you betrayed him. But if you understood. You have never really understood. You have taken the shell of me—the merely external silliness—so seriously.”
Perior could wonder at his own firmness before her. He was filled with compunction for the pitiful certainty of success—once his stubborn disbelief were convinced—that spoke through her gravity. He loved her, and knew that he loved her, against his reason, against his will, against his heart even, yet heard himself saying, sure of the kindness of his cruelty—for any prolongation of her security was cruel—
“I hope never to take a merely external silliness seriously, Camelia. Let me think of this as one. You should not have come, it can only hurt you, and me. We had best not see each other again until you have outgrown, shall we say, your present shell?” Yes, he could rely on the decisive clear-sightedness that had made him speak the truth, once for all, to Arthur and to himself. He felt secure in his moral antagonism; the ascetic admonishment of his voice gratified even a sense of humor, quite at his own expense, which he perceived in the rigor of his righteousness. But Camelia made no retreat before that rigor, though the color left her face, as if he had struck her; her eyes betrayed no confusion, but a keenness, a steadiness, almost scornful.