He thought her face betrayed a guilty agitation.
‘I happen to have met him going away. I think you’d better tell me the truth.’
‘I have told you the truth. If Mr. Eldon has been to the house, I was not aware of it.’
He looked at her in silence for a moment, then asked:
‘Are you the greatest hypocrite living?’
Adela drew farther away. She kept her eyes down. Long ago she had suspected what was in Mutimer’s mind, but she had only been apprehensive of the results of jealousy on his temper and on their relations to each other; it had not entered her thought that she might have to defend herself against an accusation. This violent question affected her strangely. For a moment she referred it entirely to the secrets of her heart, and it seemed impossible to deny what was imputed to her, impossible even to resent his way of speaking. Was she not a hypocrite? Had she not many, many times concealed with look and voice an inward state which was equivalent to infidelity? Was not her whole life a pretence, an affectation of wifely virtues? But the hypocrisy was involuntary; her nature had no power to extirpate its causes and put in their place the perfect dignity of uprightness.
‘Why do you ask me that?’ she said at length, raising her eyes for an instant.
‘Because it seems to me I’ve good cause. I don’t know whether to believe a word you say.’
‘I can’t remember to have told you falsehoods.’ Her cheeks flushed. ‘Yes, one; that I confessed to you.’
It brought to his mind the story of the wedding ring.