Geoffrey. [Facing Austin.] I won't tell her!
Austin. [Calmly.] You've got to!
Geoffrey. I'd rather shoot myself; do you understand me—I'd rather shoot myself!
Austin. That's nothing! That would be decidedly the easiest course out of it, and the most cowardly.
Geoffrey. She'll hate me! She'll loathe me! How could she help it at first! But just after a little, if I weren't there, the love she has for me might move her somehow or other—and by degrees perhaps—to forgive—
Austin. I don't deny that you will have to go through a terrible degradation with her—but that is nothing compared with what you deserve. If you tell her, at least the humiliation is secret, locked there between you two, and no one else in the world can ever know what happens; but if you send some one else, and no matter who,—any one else but you is an outsider,—you ask her to make a spectacle of her humiliation, to let a third in as witness to the relations and emotions between you two! It's insulting her again! Don't you see?
[A pause.
Geoffrey. Yes, I see! My God! I must tell her myself.
Austin. That's right, don't waver, make up your mind and do it—Come!
[Urging him up.