"Partly."
Again Seymour paused.
"I came chiefly in order to look at you," he said at length. "You are quite as beautiful as ever, you may like to know."
It was as if a further light had been turned on him, making him clearer and more real. She had confessed to Esther her inability to be "properly sorry" for him, but now found herself not so incapable.
"I can't help either you or myself," she said again. "We have both been taken in control by something outside ourselves, which never happened to either of us before. You feel that I have behaved atrociously to you, and any one you ask would agree with you. But the atrocity was necessary. I couldn't help it. Only you must not think that I am not sorry for the effect that such necessity has had on you. I regret it very much. But if you ask me whether I am ashamed of myself, I answer that I am not."
She went on with growing rapidity and animation.
"If you have been in love with me, Seymour," she said, "you will understand that, for you will know that compulsion has been put upon me. How was it any longer possible for me to marry you, when I fell in love with Hughie? I jilted you: it is a word quite hideous, like flirt, but just as never in my life did I flirt, so I have not jilted you in the hideous sense. It was not because I was tired of you, or had a fancy for some one else. There was no getting away from what happened. Hughie enveloped me. My walls fell down, and went to Jericho. It wasn't my fault. The trumpets blew, just that."
"And in walked Hugh," said Seymour.
"I am not sure about that," said Nadine. "I think he was there all the time, walled up."
Seymour was silent a moment.