"Ah! you needn't mind," Lizzie said grimly. "He's never seen anything of it. You must never give him any reason to suspect—I trust you for that. No one in this world knows but you, and you should never have known if it had not been that I had to prove my right to interfere. Perhaps even now, you don't see that I have a right, but whether I have one or no, you've got to reckon with me now——"
"And you've got to reckon," Rachel answered, with some of Lizzie's own fierceness, "with a power that's beyond your power or mine or anyone's. Don't you imagine that we, all of us, haven't tried hard enough. Why! all these last two years we've done nothing but try. Now it's simply stronger than we are. If Roddy," she went on, speaking now more slowly, "hadn't forced it.... If he'd not been impatient—but now—after what's just happened, it's right—it isn't fair to him, to myself, to any of us, that things should go on as they are——"
"I'm thinking," Lizzie answered quietly, "simply of Francis Breton."
"Well! isn't it fairer too for him? He's been living, as we have, all this time, a life that's denying all his own real self. Anything's better than being false to that—life may be hard for us if we go away together, but at any rate it will be honest——"
"Ah! that just shows how young you are! Don't I know that pursuit of truth and honesty as well as you? Don't I know that when life's beginning for us, the one thing that seems to matter is exposing ourselves, showing ourselves to the world just as we are! At first it seems such an easy thing—Just round that corner the moment's coming when the real person in us is going to stand up and proclaim itself just as it is, fine and splendid? but always something just comes in the way and stops it—the years go on and we're further off from truth than ever.
"You think that if you go off with Francis Breton now, you'll, both of you, be leading, suddenly, honest brave lives before the world. I tell you it isn't so. Things will be just as crooked, just as shadowed—issues just as confused—it will be worse than it was."
"But you don't know——"
"I know Francis Breton. Don't you know too the kind of man that he is? Don't you know that he's as weak as a man can be, weaker than any woman ever could be? He's the kind of man who must have society to bolster him up. If the men of his world are supporting him then he's as good as gold, as fine as you like. Let them leave him and down he goes. All his life the world's been down on him and that's why he's been down. Lately he's been quiet—he's been winning his place back. Soon, if he's patient, they'll all come round him again. But let him go off with you and he's done, finished—absolutely, utterly. 'Ah!' everyone will say, 'that's what we expected. That's what we always knew would happen.' Don't you know what kind of effect that will have upon him? Don't you know?... Of course you do. It will break him up. His old life abroad, creeping from place to place, will begin again, only now he'll have the additional knowledge that he's done for you as well as for himself. It will be the end, utterly the end of him. And I, who love him, will not let it be."
Lizzie's speech had roused in Rachel one of those old storms of anger. She was exerting now her utmost self-control, but her heart seemed bound tight with some cord so slender that one movement, one impulse, would snap it—Then.... She saw in Lizzie now, only moved by a sense of jealous injury—"She sits there, knowing that I've taken him from her. That's it.... That's what she's feeling—she's lost him. She can't forgive me for that."
But when she spoke her voice was quiet and controlled.