“Oh, Justin, you did!” cried Laura.
It was tactless; but she was too relieved to be careful. And yet a little blank—a little sore. It was strange to feel the nightmare of two years proved dream-stuff, swept aside, nullified in a moment, with a laugh.... It had been real enough to her.... She had paid, she was still paying, it seemed, for what he had long ago forgotten.... Somehow—it didn’t seem fair....
Justin’s voice recalled her thoughts, shifted them from herself to him. Her soreness passed as she listened to him, grown serious again. He was explaining himself to her, slowly, with naïve interest.
“I suppose I did go off the tracks a bit. A thing takes hold of you, somehow. Not the eggs—the collecting. Anything would have done as well as eggs. It just happened to be eggs. Of course—now—I admit it was absurd. But the whole business—it made one’s days so full. It was ripping to feel so keen. And when you smashed them—there was a hole in the world. Nothing to fill it. I felt lost—soured—I hated you. But when the war began all that dwindled. The war—but we talked about it the other day. It’s gone. Blown away. And now—I don’t care any more. Not a ha’penny cuss. Queer, isn’t it? So you needn’t worry. I never think of it. But what I do think sometimes—what I’ve never understood——” He stopped in front of her, staring down at her with puzzled eyes—“Laura, what on earth made you do it?”
She flushed.
“It wasn’t temper. It wasn’t cattishness.”
“No. I knew that, you know, all the time—really.”
She hesitated painfully—groping for the convincing word.
“It was——Because——Oh, Justin, you know what you said yourself, the other day—about the war altering people—altering you, even. Oh, can’t you see? I wanted to do—for you—what the war has done. I wasn’t big enough, I made an insane mess of it. But that’s what I tried to do.”
She stopped, her eyes on her hands that trembled in her lap.