Faithfulness! Then she knew ...? Did she know? ... Could it possibly have come to her knowledge already ...?
She was telling me how, after her marriage, she had first of all trusted him implicitly. "There were several incidents that made me wonder a little, but I made myself believe that he was good. I knew, of course, that women flung themselves at him—that wasn't his fault. And besides, he trusted me so much—he never seemed to bother where I went or who went with me. I loathed the idea of being jealous.... And so it went on—for a few years; I just had faith in him—in us—and if sometimes I got to hear scraps of gossip, I ignored them.... Then came an affair I couldn't possibly ignore, and there was a fearful row. I nearly left him, but he gave his promise, and I said I'd try to trust him again."
She said, rather pathetically: "You say you'll try to trust somebody again, but you don't very often succeed. Personally, I don't think you ever can—it's such a far deeper matter than repentance or forgiveness. There are some people who have it in them to do certain things, and others who haven't—and if you find out that a man belongs to the first kind, then it's final—don't you think so? ... Anyhow, I stayed on with Geoffrey, and, so far as I know, he kept his promise till last year. Then I found he'd been spending week-ends with a girl at Rotterdam.... Do you know, it didn't surprise me a bit.... It didn't even hurt me.... I just felt that I hadn't a scrap of love for him, and that it didn't matter.... I didn't trouble to mention it even; I just let things go on as if nothing had happened, and then, when the fine weather came, I took June with me to America.... And I didn't ever intend to come back."
"But June—does she know all this?"
"She knows nothing."
"You would have had to tell her."
"I daresay.... I hadn't made any plans about that. I just made up my mind to leave Geoffrey and never see him again. But of course the accident has altered that. I shall stay with him now, but I can't pretend to like him any more."
"That seems a hard thing to say."
"Perhaps it is hard. You must remember I'm French, and that makes me face the facts as they are."
I said that, however little affection she had for her husband, she wouldn't be able to stop herself from admiring his pluck and cheerfulness. She replied: "It won't matter whether I admire him or not. Admiration is nothing."