“Is it on baby’s account that you stay?”
“Not more now than at any time.”
“You don’t mind what I did, then?”
“You didn’t do anything.”
“That’s brave of you, Eve, when you hate lies so. You are trying to make me believe that nothing happened out there in the road—that I was just as usual. But I remember perfectly—I sprang at you; if I had been a man—my hands stronger—you wouldn’t be here now!”
“Fortunately you are not a man, nor anything like one,” Eve answered, in the tone of a person who makes a joke. She turned towards the door.
“Wait, I want to tell you,” said Cicely, going after her, and turning her round with her hands on her shoulders. “This is it, Eve; it comes over me with a rush sometimes, when I look at you—that here you are alive, and Ferdie dead! He was a great deal more splendid than you are, he was so handsome and so young! And yet there he is, down in the ground; and you walking about here! Nothing seems too bad for you then; my feeling is, ‘Let her die too! And see how she likes it.’”
“I should like it well enough, if somebody else did it,” Eve answered. “Death wouldn’t be a punishment, Cicely; it would be a release.”
Cicely’s grasp relaxed. “Oh, very well. Then why haven’t you tried it?”
“Because Paul Tennant is still in the world! I am pusillanimous enough to wish to breathe the same air.”