"You are not condoning," she asked slowly, "what Archie has done?"
He answered after a little pause, "To me there seems nothing unforgivable, nothing utterly vicious, except selfishness. There is no self in Archie Blair. Not enough self."
Joan told him then reluctantly of something she had never before mentioned: her final incredible scene with her husband. She was curiously ashamed of that scene, as though it were she who had betrayed herself, instead of Archie. "Should you not call that a mistake of the heart?"
But Nikolai did not appear to be particularly shocked by it. "I had no idea," he commented, "that Blair was so good an actor."
"An actor!—You think that scene was not genuine?"
"I think, in fact I know, that your husband would hesitate to sacrifice nothing to what he believed your happiness; even your respect—I love that man," he said simply. "And so do you, Joan. Otherwise he would have been powerless to hurt you."
Her eyes widened. She asked, as so many before her have asked, "Is it possible to love—two people at once?"
"Two? A dozen—a hundred! Does a mother love two children at once?—Surely that depends upon the stage of the soul's development."
"But always one best," she said quite fiercely.
"Always one best," he repeated....