Still leaning on her, he moved to a couch, and drew her down beside him.
"First," he said, "I will tell you why I lied to Inspector Fay. I did not go into the house to fill my cigarette case. I was mad. It came on me—as it often does—when I see sane people about me—a rush of hatred and despair."
He spoke dispassionately, without a trace of the terrible disorder that had possessed him a few minutes before. Only the gloom remained—the shadow that never left him.
"You can understand," he went on, "what my life has been since this cloud first settled on me. I tried to fight against it—but how could I fight against a thing that I knew to be there, creeping on me day after day—when I knew that in the end I must give way? Every hour seemed to bring some fresh proof of the madness that was in me—some proof that made resistance more and more futile and hopeless. A thousand times I have been tempted to kill myself—but always there was the dim, desperate hope that some miraculous twist of sanity might yet deliver me. I can't convey to you a tenth—a hundredth—part of the agony of that struggle. There were times when I shrank into the farthest corner of my darkest cellar, and prayed, as only a madman could pray, to be spared from the unjust curse. There were times when I stood out on the roof of my house, and defied the God I had prayed to...."
He stared straight out in front of him, a figure of unutterable pathos—a helpless accuser of Eternal Laws.
"If I were suffering for a fault of my own, I would bear my punishment uncomplaining. But I am innocent. I have done nothing to deserve this torture. And there is always the thought of what I might have been—of what I know I could have been. That is the cruelest torment of all. I have to see sane men and women wasting every minute of their lives—without the slightest appreciation of the value, or the responsibilities, of reason—who might as well be mad, for all the use they are to their fellow-creatures. And I...." He broke off. "That is enough about myself," he said. "I want to talk about you."
He looked at her in surprise, as if noticing the alteration in her for the first time.
"How changed you are," he said. "You have never looked like that before. You have always been so hard. Why have you never looked like that before?"
She was silent. She bent her head, as if ashamed of betraying herself.
"Was all that hardness ... only a cloak ... to hide yourself?"