“Because, though I wouldn’t acknowledge it, I knew he wanted to break with me and the only way I could keep him was to make good.”
“Good heavens, how horrible!” I winced under her pitiless plain speaking.
“Yes, it was,” she said gently.
There was a pause. The little palliatives I had to offer, the timid consolations, were shriveled up by that fierce and uncompromising candor. Her voice broke the silence, quietly questioning:
“I suppose you think I did a very bad thing?”
“Oh, Lizzie, don’t ask me that. I can’t sit in judgment. That’s for you, not for me.”
She looked at her hands, long and thin on the quilt. Thus down-drooped, her face was shockingly haggard and wasted. Yet of the storm which had caused this ruin she was now speaking with a cold impersonal calm, as if it had all happened to somebody else. My own emotions that swelled to passionate expression died away before that inscrutable and baffling indifference.
“He was a very fine man,” she said suddenly.
“Fine?” I gasped.
“Yes, in lots of ways. About his art and work for one thing—he had great ideals. And he was very good to me.”