Of course, he told himself, he knew the part that worried her in this, her first review. He would have kept it back if he had been quite sure that she would never see it. He rather wished now that he had. It was that stupid bit of course about more French than English. He only hoped they wouldn't all be like that—and none of them worse.
He recalled, as moment joined past moment, his own amusement at some of the passages. They had solved all his problems about Helena. No one but a really innocent girl could be so frank, because to the impure all truth is suspicious. It was only after reading these delicious passages two or three times that Geoffrey Alison, getting a tardy view of the whole book, realised how it might interest the world at large and seem worth while to that shrewd devil Blatchley.
Now, when still she sat impassive, looking at that notice with a slight frown on her forehead, he began to suspect that possibly he had been just a little of a cad. He ought perhaps to have warned her that some of it, though absolutely all right if everybody had pure minds,——
Yet after all, how could he have told her that? It would be jolly awkward, you know, and only putting ideas into her head. Besides, of course, with those bits cut out, Blatchley would probably have called it tame and struck.... His silence had been really for her good.
At last these alternate surges of guilt and self-justification grated on his nerves. He could endure her silence not a moment longer.
"That's only the first one," he said; "and it's not much of a paper." Now for the reproaches! Better to turn the tap on than to shiver, waiting.
But not for the first time he had misjudged her. It was not that part of the review which had struck home to her so different mind.
"Do you really think the husband stands out as such a brute as all that?" she surprised him by asking.
"No. I thought it exactly like Hubert," was his answer. He could not read her mind; he said the first thing that came into his.
He could not have said a worse. It strengthened all her doubts, fears, and regrets. She really had forgotten, almost, what was in the book. It had been written in such hot excitement and she had scarcely read it since. Ally would not let her see the proofs; he said it wasn't safe, with Hubert there.... She had imagined that the wife was far more silly than herself, the husband altogether different from Hubert. Now, reading that synopsis, she saw (for the first time), how truly that summed up their married life: she had wished to "develop an ego," he had thwarted her. He would read it too, that or another, and suspect. Then he would get the book—and know. And he would think she meant it all, meant all the wild complaints of Zoë, Zoë whom at first she used to think of as "sloppy" Virginia!