“Nothing. After all—how could he? I mean, without indiscretion?”
“Indiscretion? Oh——” She shrugged the word away with half a smile, as though such considerations belonged to a prehistoric order of things. “Then he hasn’t even told you that he wants me to get a divorce?”
“A divorce?” Campton exclaimed. He sat staring at her as if the weight of his gaze might pin her down, keep her from fluttering away and breaking up into luminous splinters. George wanted her to get a divorce—wanted, therefore, to marry her! His passion went as deep for her as that—too deep, Campton conjectured, for the poor little ephemeral creature, who struck him as wriggling on it like a butterfly impaled.
“Please tell me,” he said at length; and suddenly, in short inconsequent sentences, the confession poured from her.
George, it seemed, during the previous winter in New York, when they had seen so much of each other, had been deeply attracted, had wanted “everything,” and at once—and there had been moments of tension and estrangement, when she had been held back by scruples she confessed she no longer understood (inherited prejudices, she supposed), and when her reluctance must have made her appear to be trifling, whereas, really it was just that she couldn’t ... couldn’t.... So they had gone on for several months, with the usual emotional ups-and-downs, till he had left for Europe to join his father; and when they had parted she had given him the half-promise that if they met abroad during the summer she would perhaps ... after all....
Then came the war. George had been with her during those few last hours in Paris, and had dined with her and her husband (had Campton forgiven her?) the night before he was mobilised. And then, when he was gone, she had understood that only timidity, vanity, the phantom barriers of old terrors and traditions, had prevented her being to him all that he wanted....
She broke off abruptly, put in a few conventional words about an ill-assorted marriage, and never having been “really understood,” and then, as if guessing that she was on the wrong tack, jumped up, walked to the other end of the studio, and turned back to Campton with the tears running down her ravaged face.
“And now—and now—he says he won’t have me!” she lamented.
“Won’t have you? But you tell me he wants you to be divorced.”
She nodded, wiped away the tears, and in so doing stole an unconscious glance at the mirror above the divan. Then, seeing that the glance was detected, she burst into a sort of sobbing laugh. “My nose gets so dreadfully red when I cry,” she stammered.