"Here's your hanky," she said, tossing the moist, scrunched ball across to him. "Cruel! We didn't mean to be cruel. I suppose we were. She used to ask us to try. There was a game we played; we called it Christian Martyrs. She was always the martyr; she liked it. All she ever did when we hurt her was to say, 'Do it harder; I can bear more than that.' She was as proud then as she is to-day of all that she could bear. I think that's what made her husband furious. She seemed always to be saying to him, 'Do it harder,' and he certainly did. But neither he nor any one else has ever succeeded in making her cry."
Tabs glanced at the aloof beauty of the painted face—it was like the face of a Roman Empress, so proudly secure in its serenity. "Make her cry! Why should any one want to make her cry? To do that would be a kind of blasphemy."
"That's why," Maisie clasped her hands eagerly. "You've said it for me exactly. I've never known how to put it. It's the holiness of God that tempts men to revile Him. He evades them, outlasts them and yet compels their affection. They have no power over Him and can't destroy Him, though they can destroy everything else in the world. What a man loves and has no power over, he longs to destroy; either that, or to drag it down to his own level, so that he can get his arms round it and comfort its weakness and hug it to his breast. It was that way with Di and her husband. He couldn't drag her
down. He couldn't find her weakness. She was always up there. So he reviled her."
A silence fell between them. They stared at each other across the room's breadth, finding each in the other something at the same time intimate and incomprehensible; each feeling that they stood on the verge of a discovery. It was Tabs who spoke.
"Was! Then he's dead?"
She barely nodded. "Killed at the Somme, poor fellow. He must have hated her to the end. In everything else he was large and splendid."
"And his name?"
Again Tabs was striving to remember where he had seen the unknown woman's face. He had seen it—of that he was certain. He had the sense that the circumstances under which he had seen it had been tragic. If he could only make Maisie reveal the name, he might recall.