"Nicholas," she said at last. "If I spoke just now of a desperate remedy, it's because I've been feeling desperate. I really mean it, quite literally. It's not just a word."
His mouth twitched a little.
"My dearest child, you've only known that there was anything to be desperate about for the last twenty-four hours. Heaven knows I don't want to minimize the unspeakable thing I've done, but still—desperation—when you say yourself that it's an episode, merely——"
"You don't understand, Nicholas. I've been in despair for longer than I can tell you. This affair is nothing—a sin of the body. If it's a wrong done to me, and I suppose in a way it is—then I forgive you—of course I do. Honestly, it doesn't seem to me to matter much—and as you said just now, I'd left you alone, and we hadn't been of much use to one another. I think it was partly my fault, that it happened at all."
"My darling child, you can talk generously and frankly like that, and yet you speak of divorce!"
There was the impatience in his voice that had so often led her hastily to disavow her own views.
"Don't you see how utterly illogical you're being?"
She shook her head.
"You haven't understood. You think I just used the word divorce as a sort of threat, to show that I knew what a serious wrong you'd done me—that I didn't mean it, or didn't understand what such a step really means. But Nicholas, I'll be honest with you—at last, I'll be honest. I've thought of divorce before—I've thought of death—of running away—of anything that would enable us to begin again. This thing that's happened may provide the means."
"But then you've hated me?"