Mammon and Co.

by E. F. Benson

And the answer was as simple:

"Tell your husband."

"I think Jack would kill me if I told him," said Kit.

"I am very sure he would not. Besides, what does that matter? Oh, what does that matter?"

Kit looked up at her in silence, but after a moment Lily went on.

"Don't you see what I mean?" she said. "There are some situations in life, Kit, and this is one, where no side-issue, like being killed, comes in. There is, as God is above us, absolutely only one thing to be done, though there are a hundred arguments against it. What is the use of telling him? you might ask. Use? Of course there is no use. Why tell the disgrace? why make him miserable? why make him hate you, perhaps? Simply because you must—you must! Oh, my poor, poor Kit, I am so glad you told me! It must be something to tell anyone, even a feeble little fool like me. How could you have borne it alone? Oh, Kit, Kit!"

Again there was silence. Lily sat leaning forward in her chair, bending towards the other, with all the pure sweet womanliness of her nature yearning in her eyes. Perhaps she should have been shocked. She was not, for pity swallowed up the very ground on which censure should have stood. The two women, as asunder as the poles, were for the moment brought close by the Divine identical experience of their sex; yet what was to be to one the flower of her life and the crown of her womanhood, was to the other a bitterness ineffaceable, a shuddering agony.

"Oh, it is difficult, it is difficult!" went on Lily; "but when was anything worth doing easy? Does not all in you that you know to be best point one way? You cannot imagine going on living with Jack, day by day, week by week, without telling him. And when it comes——"

Lily broke off suddenly. Here was no question of words. What could argument do in a case that admitted of none? There was one thing—one thing only—to be done; all else was impossible. If Kit did not feel that in her very blood and bones, no words could conceivably make her. She had been sitting quite still and silent, apathetic apparently, during Lily's speech. After her outbreak at the beginning, such entire composure was unnatural. The two might have been talking of Danish politics for all the interest Kit seemed to take in the subject. Inwardly storm and tempest raged; old voices, memories, all that was innocent, called to her; the gales of her soul bugled and shook the foundations of her building, but as yet the moment had not come. Then suddenly the slightest tremor seemed to shake her, and Lily saw that she was beginning to feel, and that some fibre long dormant or numb was still vital.

"All I say to you seems nothing more than platitude, perhaps?" she went on; "but platitudes are worth consideration when one touches the great things of life—when interest, tact, inclination, cleverness, are all sunk, and we are left with the real things, the big things—goodness, wickedness, what is right, what is wrong."