"I knew just enough, even then, to know that nothing but the best of all would satisfy me—and for me Nicholas could never be anything but the second-best. Everything—except the one thing needful. Even then, if I'd been honest with myself, and admitted that it was a second-best.... But I wasn't—all this time I've tried to put into our relationship a value that it hasn't got. This infidelity of his...." She remembered it with a shock of surprise. "It doesn't matter, in itself. But it can set me free—free to begin again, to possess myself, to eliminate pretenses. My life with Nicholas is all held together by pretenses."
There came another thought and for an instant she was tempted to sheer away, with a tag on her lips of conventional optimism, "What's the use of thinking about what may never happen?"
Then she faced it, and deliberately recalled words spoken to her by Giulio della Torre, wise in his own generation.
"What you need—what you must have, if you are ever to fulfil yourself—it is romance.... You will learn not to be afraid of life, some day." And at the end, when he had spoken of all that she had need to be taught:
"C'est le ton qui fait la musique."
It was the teacher, not the teaching, that mattered.
"Some day, I shall love," thought Lily.
And she reflected coldly: "It is at least possible, if not probable. Am I to pretend to myself that such a thing is out of the question, because I am married? Why, I don't even know what I should do—whether I might not leave Nicholas altogether. And break his heart—oh, Nicholas!"
She was fond of him, she knew that she would always be fond of him. It would be impossible to her to be ruthless where Nicholas was concerned, she thought, and next moment she told herself fiercely that her opportunity had come, that she would divorce him, and find herself free to begin life again, alone.
It was just. Nicholas had given her just cause.