“She’s gone to one of them. She’s just gone away to be free, not to lead somebody else’s life any more. When she has got a good breath of air, she may, apparently, come back. But she doesn’t promise.”
Nellie had grown quite serious again.
“That’s even more wonderful of her,” she said. “She just went away because she wanted to be herself. My dear, what a mother! And waiting till you were married! And your father? Go on.”
This time Peter’s mouth strayed beyond the limits of mere reflective meditation, and smiled broadly.
“He has discovered, to his complete satisfaction, why she left him,” he said. “He knows—as if Gabriel had told him—that his tremendous personality, his devotion to Art, all that sort of thing, was too much for her. He reproaches himself bitterly—and oh, my dear, how he enjoys it—with having failed to realize the frailty—not moral—the weakness, the ordinariness of other people. She was scorched in his magnificent flames, and escaped from that furnace with her life.”
“But how lovely for him!” said Nellie. “Lovely for her, too. But why tragedy? You said it was a tragedy?”
His whole body gave a jubilant jerk. If he had been standing up he must have jumped.
“Ah, you do see that, don’t you?” he cried. “I just rejoice in her! At least, I would——”
Nellie divined perfectly well that “if Silvia understood” really completed the sentence. But if Peter wished, for the present anyhow, to leave that unspoken, loyalty to their comradeship prevented her from suggesting it. Another motive, not less potent than that, dictated her silence on the point, for she infinitely preferred that he should volunteer some such information concerning himself and Silvia than that she should give away her knowledge of it. Certainly she longed to know in what real relation he and Silvia stood to each other, but it would be a tactical error (tactical was too businesslike) to let him know that his incomplete sentence gave her so certain a hint.
“I see,” she said quickly. “You would rejoice in her if it wasn’t for your father.”