“Eve,” he said, very gently, “you don't know what you say.”
She had lowered her eyes as he came towards her; now again she lifted them in a swift, upward glance. For the first time since he had entered the room a slight look of personal doubt and uneasiness showed in her face. “Why?” she said. “I—I don't understand.”
For a moment he answered nothing. He had found his first explanation overwhelming; now suddenly it seemed to him that his present difficulty was more impossible to surmount. “I came here to-night to tell you something,” he began, at last, “but so far I have only said half—”
“Half?”
“Yes, half.” He repeated the word quickly, avoiding the question in her eyes. Then, conscious of the need for explanation, he plunged into rapid speech.
“A fraud like mine,” he said, “has only one safeguard, one justification—a boundless audacity. Once shake that audacity and the whole motive power crumbles. It was to make the audacity impossible—to tell you the truth and make it impossible—that I came to-night. The fact that you already knew made the telling easier—but it altered nothing.”
Eve raised her head, but he went resolutely on.
“To-night,” he said, “I have seen into my own life, into my own mind, and my ideas have been very roughly shaken into new places.
“We never make so colossal a mistake as when we imagine that we know ourselves. Months ago, when your husband first proposed this scheme to me, I was, according to my own conception, a solitary being vastly ill-used by Fate, who, with a fine stoicism, was leading a clean life. That was what I believed; but there, at the very outset, I deceived myself. I was simply a man who shut himself up because he cherished a grudge against life, and who lived honestly because he had a constitutional distaste for vice. My first feeling when I saw your husband was one of self-righteous contempt, and that has been my attitude all along. I have often marvelled at the flood of intolerance that has rushed over me at sight of him—the violent desire that has possessed me to look away from his weakness and banish the knowledge of it; but now I understand.
“I know now what the feeling meant. The knowledge came to me to-night. It meant that I turned away from his weakness because deep within myself something stirred in recognition of it. Humanity is really much simpler than we like to think, and human impulses have an extraordinary fundamental connection. Weakness is egotism—but so is strength. Chilcote has followed his vice; I have followed my ambition. It will take a higher judgment than yours or mine to say which of us has been the more selfish man.” He paused and looked at her.