Peter shifted himself a little further back in his chair and drew his legs more closely towards him, so that his chin rested on the plateau of his knees.
“I am not being ironical,” he said. “I am trying to tell you precisely what happened. He made a noise—a gurgle, I think I should call it—and he asked who the damned villain was with whom she had gone. And, to be quite bald, that seemed to me to be unreal. I said that there wasn’t any damned villain, and that she had gone just because she felt she must be free. He wanted to see the letter, and I told him that I had torn it up. Then he began throwing his hair-brushes and dress-clothes into a bag, in order to start off and look for her, and asked me where she was. When I told him that I hadn’t the slightest idea, he accused me of collusion with her. I merely denied that, and said that her letter was as great a surprise to me as it was to him.”
Peter threw away the end of his cigarette.
“Then he began to guess why she had gone. Now the point of my tearing up my mother’s letter was that he shouldn’t know, wasn’t it, darling?”
Silvia heard herself assent. There was a sickness of the heart coming over her, something too subtle for her to diagnose as yet.
“So he began to guess,” continued Peter, “and as he tried to guess I was sorry for him—really sorry, you understand?”
Silvia’s heart began to thrive again.
“Yes, yes; I knew you would be!” she cried.
“He soon hit on the reason,” said Peter quietly. “There could only have been one reason, so he thought, and it filled him with the utmost remorse. He had been too big for her, that was what it came to—too great. He had not, in the exaltation of his art—this is quite what he said—remembered the limitations of—of the rest of us. She had fainted before the furnace of his genius. It was all his fault: he hadn’t made allowance for the prodigious strain on her—for the effects, cumulative no doubt, of the high pressure. He strode about the room, he knocked over a chair——”
Some fierce antagonism to his narrative blazed up in Silvia. She had wanted the facts, and here they were, but she had not allowed for the baldness of their presentation, though she had asked for it.