“From love—sudden love, apparently—of Arsenio Valdez, or just to avoid Waldo? For there seems no real doubt that Arsenio’s taken her. He’s only once been to the flat, but the girl’s been going out for walks every day—all alone; a thing that I understand from her mother she very seldom did before.”
“Oh, it’s the Monkey all right. But that only tells us the fact—it doesn’t explain it.”
“Very often there aren’t any explanations in love affairs—no reasonable ones, Julius. Waldo takes it very hard, I’m afraid.”
“She’s made an ass of him before all London. It can’t really be hushed up, you know.”
“Well,” Aunt Bertha admitted candidly, “if such an affair happened in any other family, I should certainly make it my business to find out all I could about it.” She gave a little sigh. “It’s a shock to me. I’ve seen a lot, and known a lot of people in my day. But when you grow old, your world narrows. It grows so small that a small thing can smash it. You Rillington men had become my world; and I had just opened it wide enough to let in Lucinda. Now it seems that I might just as well have let in a high explosive. In getting out again herself, she’s blown the whole thing—the whole little thing—to bits.”
“Love’s a mad and fierce master,” I said—with a reminiscence of my classics, I think. “He doesn’t care whom or what he breaks.”
“No! Poor Lucinda! I wish she’d a nice woman with her!”
I laughed at that. “The nice woman would feel singularly de trop, I think.”
“She could make her tea, and tell her that in the circumstances she could hardly be held responsible for what she did. Those are the two ways of comforting women, Julius.”