“Oh, Eileen, my poor little sister!”
“Don’t let it hurt you,” the girl cried, her eyes filling. “If life isn’t so perfect, I can stand it. There is one thing more important than the man you love—and that is your conviction of what is square and honest. Syd can tell me what to do in other matters—but this is in your line, not his.”
“Dearest, it seems to me that there can be no sure foothold in marriage if a wife conceals from her husband an experience as important as that. I know what a humiliation it is to open such a secret chamber. I did it, Eileen.”
“Judith, you don’t think I—” She stared, aghast. “You couldn’t think me capable of taking Sydney Schubert’s love—a man as clean and honourable as he is—without telling him why I went to New York?”
“Then he knows?”
“He knew ... all along.” Her fair cheeks flamed. “When he told me he cared, I said there was a reason why I couldn’t ever marry any decent man. Judith, he put his two arms around me and looked me square in the eyes, and said: ‘You were a poor little wilful child, and you didn’t know that fire would burn. Any woman, my dear, is good enough for any man—if she is honest.’ The only thing he wanted to know was ... what we had done with it. He said that would make a difference. He was relieved when I told him. And he thinks you were made in heaven—to have saved me—for him.”
“But if you have told him, and he is satisfied—what is the obstacle?”
“It is his father. I can’t marry Syd and go there to live, letting Papa Schubert believe I am the pure white flower he thinks me. Syd says he won’t have his father’s ideal of me shattered—because his father wouldn’t look at it the way he does. He might forgive me: but I’d always be tarnished, to him.”
“Do you remember, Eileen, the day you told the truth to Laura Ramsay? You began by saying you were under no moral obligation to her mother. I don’t know how we can draw those lines of distinction; but I feel them with absolute certainty. You are under no need to confess your secret to Sylvia or Theodora—and for widely different reasons. Indeed we must go to any length to prevent Theo ever learning the truth. With Dr. Schubert it is the same. It would only give him useless pain.”
“That’s what Syd said. He led me over to that little peachblow vase—the one that was bequeathed to his father by one of his grateful patients. He told me the satin glaze and the peachbloom tints were the result of the heat in the kiln, that almost destroyed the body of the vase. He asked me if I would be willing to break that little amphora, that his father loves, just to prove to him that it isn’t as perfect on the inside as it looks to him. He might patch the fragments together, but he would always be conscious of the cracks.”