“I showed him Helen Framley’s letter. He told me how much he appreciated my being perfectly honest about it all. He said that many a woman would have been tempted to go through with the marriage and do exactly as this Miss Framley had suggested. But he said that I’d better write her and tell her that now the marriage was absolutely out of the question, so that Jannix wouldn’t get in touch with Philip.”
“Why did he want to keep Jannix from getting in touch with Philip?”
“He didn’t want Philip to be disillusioned so brutally. That was the idea back of the whole thing. I was to save face, but it wasn’t on my own account. It was to protect Philip.”
“Who suggested it?”
“Why, it was something we worked out together, sort of a collaboration. He said that for the time being, at least, I must step out of the picture in some way so that Philip would never know what had happened until after he had accustomed himself to my absence, and then we could let it come out. He said that sometime in the future, if I secured a divorce from Jannix and there was no reason why I couldn’t marry, I could meet Philip again and explain everything to him.”
“You didn’t feel that you should go to Philip and tell him frankly—”
“Well, to tell you the truth, Mr. Lam, I did. That was why I’d gone to the office. I wanted to make a clean breast to Philip and explain things to him. I wanted to try and break it to him so it wouldn’t hurt him quite so much. But his father told me he understood Philip better than I did, and that the thing for me to do was to disappear under such circumstances that it would appear something very unusual had happened to me. I really think he was thinking as much of himself as of Philip. You see, the announcements of the engagement had all been made and the wedding date was set; and if— Well, you know how it is. You simply have to make some explanation under those circumstances. The Whitewell family was in a peculiar position.”
“In other words, Whitewell didn’t want to go to his friends at the club, and have one of them say, ‘Did your son get married today?’ and have to say, ‘No. After all, we found the woman had another husband living, so we called it off.’ ”
She winced.
I said, “I’m being brutal because I want you to see it from my angle.”