He jerked each sentence out painfully.
Effie met his eyes with her serene gaze. “That’s infinitely best,” she said. “I’m proud of you.”
He had seen! It was her victory, complete and unequivocal, and she was proud of him and of herself. He had got rid of mud and he had seen beauty. Now he was facing the facts as she would have him face them, clear-eyed, without romance. Like her, he was a realist, and she was glad... glad.
But when he went up to their room to pack his bag, Effie left the Inn quickly and walked hard. She must put space between them: space, that she might cry unheard. It seemed to her that if he heard her crying he would not go, and she wanted him to go. She was a realist. She was... stifling her sobs amongst the heather; triumphing in victory on Marbeck Ridge.
She won, as she had said that she would win. But there were limits to her bravery.
CHAPTER XXI—SATAN’S SMILE
THE theory that Satan is a subtle devil is one which will not bear examination. He is a crude fellow, theatrical, Mephistophelean. It may, of course, be only because his experience of human nature has made a cynic of him, and certainly his interferences do not as a rule lack success because they want delicacy. He attacked Sam with a blatant effrontery which suggested that he thought Sam’s a contemptuously easy case.
Sam reached Manchester very early in the morning, and spent the rest of his broken night in a lugubrious hotel near the station. Manchester hotels rarely make for gaiety, but it is wonderful what even a short night will do in the way of altering a point of view.