“So much the better,” he mumbled.
“Then why? why?”
“Well, I thought. . . .”
“You thought I loved you?” she asked quickly.
“Not so far as that. I thought perhaps you might come to. There was sympathy. . . .”
She came away from the front table. Her hands were pressed against her breast; her face tormented. To Wilfred, who was wrought up too, that seemed natural. “Wilfred, tell me plainly what you have been doing these last months,” she said breathlessly.
“I’ll tell you,” he said quickly, “I . . .”
A cry escaped her. “No! Don’t tell me. . . . !”
But he was already under way. “I fell in love, as they put it, with a woman who preferred Joe Kaplan to me,” he said bitterly. “You know all about Joe Kaplan. She married him. Well, that cured that. Afterwards I slid into an affair with a woman whom I despised. That soon ran its course. Then I went to the country and tried to haul myself up by my own boot-straps without succeeding. That’s all.”
Frances Mary had returned to her chair. She was sitting forward in an attitude unnatural to her, her head lowered. “You experienced passion . . . for a woman you despised?” she murmured.