VII
Here's where I'm in danger of going astray. I feel I must keep on reminding myself of the circumstances—forgetting Helen herself and thinking only of the case as it would be docketed in some psychologist's bureau.... A woman, aged thirty-eight, married to a charming, clever, and wealthy man who, owing to an accident, cannot move out of his chair. Eight years ago she had an "affair" with a man seven years her junior, upsetting his career and half-ruining his life altogether. Now, while her husband passes his dull eventless days as best he can, she meets this young man and amuses herself with him again....
It all sound pretty hopeless. And yet I can hear now her words, spoken amidst the dreaming haze of that summer afternoon.... "I'm not amusing myself. I'm in earnest as I've never been before. I've been in earnest ever since that night I told him the truth about Karelsky. Do you remember how wrong we all were about him? June and you thought it would do him harm to be told how he'd been swindled, and I thought it would do him good—and we were all wrong, because it just hadn't any effect on him at all! He didn't care—he was beyond things like money or fame.... There's something in him—something that makes him the sort of man he is—something that draws me to him more than love. It is more than love.... I could have gone without him easily but for seeing that in him.... Hilton, can't you realize? He's straight and he's true, and I've been living my life up to now with a man who laughs at straightness and truth. Can't you imagine how it is—can't you see?"
I remember how I was silent, and how, touching my arm eagerly, she went on: "I know what you're thinking. You're thinking I haven't been very straight and true myself.... But I have. I've been true to one man, and that's all you can expect any woman to be. It isn't my fault that the man I've been true to doesn't happen to be my husband.... He might have been if you hadn't interfered."
"If I hadn't interfered?"
"Yes ... that's what I said."
"You mean, I suppose, that I'm to blame for persuading Terry to go to Vienna?"
"Everything would have been different if you hadn't done so."
"You would have gone away with him?"
"Yes."