"It means that I don't know what I shall do at all. I'm rather sick of everything—and so I might do anything. I don't want to come back to live in America, and yet I feel an alien over there, now that I haven't Gerald to give me a raison d'être. They're awfully nice to me—at Southsea—at Silchester—everywhere—and yet they really don't want me. I can see that as plainly as I can see your name on this card. But I can't keep away from them. I've no pride. At least, I've got the pride, but there's something in me stronger than pride that makes me a kind of craven. I'm like a dog that doesn't mind being kicked so long as he can hang about under the dining-room table to sniff up crumbs. With my temperament it's perfectly humiliating, but I can't help it. I've got the taste for that English life as a Frenchman gets a taste for absinthe—knows that it'll be the ruin of him, and yet goes on drinking."
"I suppose you're not in love with any one over there?"
There was no curiosity in this question. Olivia asked it—she could scarcely tell why. She noticed that Drusilla stopped writing again and once more half turned round, though it was not till long afterward that she attached significance to the fact.
"Who on earth should I be in love with? What put that into your head?"
"Oh, I don't know. Stranger things have happened. You see a great many men—"
So they went skimming over the surface of confidence, knowing that beneath what they said there were depths below depths that they dared not disturb. All the same, it was some relief to both when the maid came to the door to summon them to luncheon.
IX
uring the next day and the next Guion continued ill, so ill that his daughter had all she could attend to in the small tasks of nursing. The lull in events, however, gave her the more time for thinking, and in her thoughts two things struck her as specially strange. Of these, the first and more remarkable was the degree to which she identified herself with her father's wrong-doing. The knowledge that she had for so many years been profiting by his misdeeds produced in her a curious sense of having shared them. Though she took pains to remind herself that she was morally guiltless, there was something within her—an imaginative quality perhaps that rejected the acquittal. Pity, too, counted in her mental condition, as did also that yearning instinct called maternal, which keeps women faithful to the weak and the fallen among those they love. To have washed her own hands and said, "See here! I am innocent!" would have seemed to her much like desertion of a broken old man who had no one but her to stand by him. Even while she made attempts to reason herself out of it, the promptings to the vicarious acceptance of guilt, more or less native to the exceptionally strong and loyal, was so potent in her that she found herself saying, in substance if not in words, "Inasmuch as he did it, I did it, too." It was not a purposely adopted stand on her part; it was not even clear to her why she was impelled to take it; she took it only because, obeying the dictates of her nature; she could do nothing else.