This time I didn’t answer because a thought had surged up in my mind that had put everything else out—I ought to tell him! He was under Lizzie’s spell and Lizzie was as unknown to him as if she had been an inhabitant of Mars. He was charmed by a creature of his own creating, an ideal built up on her beauty and her weakness. Did he know her as she really was he would have recoiled from her as if she had been one of the sirens from whom Ulysses fled. She was the opposite of everything he imagined her to be, of everything he held sacred in woman. John Masters had been her lover. It was appalling, monstrous. I must tell him.
And then I thought of her and how she had confessed her secret and I had said I wouldn’t tell.
The impulse to reveal it for his sake and the impulse to keep silent for hers, began to struggle in me. I became a battle-ground of two contending forces. The desire to tell was strongest; it was like a live thing fighting to get out. It filled me, crushed every other thought and impulse, swelled up through my throat and pressed on my lips. I bit them and walked on with fixed eyes. As if from a distance I heard Roger’s voice:
“From what you said he must be an impossible cad. I knew she couldn’t have had him for a friend. Poor girl, having to associate with a man like that because business demanded it. What a rotten existence.”
I had to tell.
“Roger,” I said, hearing my voice sound hoarse.
“Yes.”
I felt suddenly dizzy and halted. Like a vision I saw Lizzie lying on the sofa, whispering to me that Masters had left her. The inside of my mouth was so dry I had difficulty in articulating. I stammered:
“Wait. I can’t walk so fast.”
He was very apologetic.