Elsie winced. ‘I was going to say there’s something I can’t understand. I always thought you were the soul of honour, and you were once. Yet you were going away from me without a word of explanation.’
Sorrow looked out at her from his eloquent brown eyes. ‘My dear Elsie, don’t disappoint me. You’ve always been so understanding and helpful. How many men would have confided to their wives all that I have confided to you about my love for Marion?’
‘But, Jim!’ She frowned again, struggling to believe the best of him. ‘Jim, you didn’t tell me anything until other people had begun to make scandal.’ The idea hardened her. ‘I don’t believe you’d ever have told me. You would just have gone on deceiving us both.’
A gesture of impatience, and that was all. He did not give way to anger. ‘My dear, I realize how hard it is for you to listen to the voice of reason in a crisis like this, but you will try, won’t you? It all began in the most innocent, the most human way. I was overwhelmed by my compassion for the poor child—virtually imprisoned, as she is, with a husband she can’t even respect, let alone love. And then the affection ripened. She stimulates me wonderfully. She is an inspiration, just the inspiration that I need. Our minds are so beautifully attuned.’
And still Elsie was not satisfied. ‘You know I don’t grudge you anything, Jim. It’s the deceit that worries me. She ought to know about me. You ought not to take her under false pretences. It’s not like you, Jim, to be content with a vulgar intrigue.’
‘There is nothing vulgar in love.’ He softened the rebuke by taking her hand, which she instantly withdrew. ‘And nothing guilty,’ he added, with a note of sternness.
Her laugh was of a kind that could not but shock him. ‘How clever you are at putting me in the wrong!’ she remarked, when her bitter mirth had subsided. ‘But I’m not wrong.’ Emotion induced in her a vitality that made him almost admire her. ‘I’m not sticking up for Respectability or any of the seven deadly virtues, as you call them. You dethroned these gods for me long ago. But there is something I believe in. I do believe in honour, and I hate a liar.... You’ve deceived her as well as me.’
Wyvern sighed. It was sometimes hard to be patient with women. ‘Elsie, why do you say things which you know to be untrue?’ His tone was still gentle.
‘Well, isn’t it true?’ she retorted. ‘Have you told her about me? Have you explained that a man so many-sided as yourself needs the love of more than one woman? Have you told her that the human heart is capable of almost infinite expansion? You know you haven’t.’
‘I respect you too much,’ he replied, cold with a new dignity, ‘and I respect myself too much ever to discuss you with another woman. I thought you understood me better, Elsie.’