“It was your fault at Atlantic City—and afterward—when I’d let you see—far more than a girl should ever let any man see.”
“But you know how impossible it was for me then—till I’d told you who I was.”
“I know it now. I didn’t know it before half an hour ago. And the time when you told me that—that thing—at Rosyth—I had no idea whether or not you meant.... And when you blame me for not coming down-stairs quicker than I did—”
“I haven’t blamed you, Regina.”
“You can’t imagine what it was to be all at sea not merely as to what you felt, but actually as to what you were—and had been. When you pulled the pearls out of your pocket—and said you were that man—”
There were two or three minutes during which she stood with face averted, and I had to give her time to regain her self-control.
“You see,” she went on, her rich mezzo just noticeably tremulous—“you see, I’d always thought about him—a girl naturally would, finding him in her room like that—but I’d thought of him as.... And I’d been thinking of you, too. I’d been thinking of you as the very opposite of him. He was so terrible—so gaunt—so stricken—I see just a little of him in you now, after all you’ve suffered.... But you—I don’t know what it was you had about you—your brother had it, too—I saw it again when I met him at Evelyn’s in Montreal, something a little more than distinguished, something faithful and good.”
“Those things are often hang-overs of inheritance that have no counterpart in the nature.”
“Well, whatever it was I saw it—and all that year those two types had been before my mind. Then when I was told that there were not two—that there was only one—it was like asking me to understand that the earth had only one pole, and that the North and the South Poles were identical.” She surprised me with the question, “Did you ever read La Dame aux Camélias?”
I said I had, wondering at the connection.