For a little while Lily thought that the conflict lay, as so often, between sincerity and sentiment.
Then illumination came to her, searing and vivid.
Was the freedom for which she looked to be based upon yet another artificial value? Was she to exact from Nicholas a supreme penalty for that which had been powerless to hurt her?
Philip Stellenthorpe might say that there was one reason for which the tie of marriage might be set aside. Nicholas himself, piteously bewildered, might admit technical justification for such penalization, the world might condemn Nicholas and be right in so doing by the letter of the law, but the wife of Nicholas knew that in the spirit he had not sinned against her, and that she had no right to turn against himself his sin of the body for her own ends.
"If I loved him I should forgive him. Not loving him, there is no real question of forgiveness at all. It's the old test—the applying of a general law to a particular case—taking one's values ready-made—the old, old humbug."
The last, comforting falsity fell from her, and she saw the ultimate presentment of all the truth that she would ever know, in stark finality.
She could build for herself no freedom upon a foundation of pretence.
XXII
The unendurable circumstance remains unaltered. The alteration is in the soul that suffers.