“Do you love him?”
Ellen smiled again. “How should I know that? I’ve not been in love a hundred times. I had never met anything like this. I had my whole life planned, perfectly, to the very end. I don’t know what’s to happen now.”
Before she answered Mrs. Callendar sighed. “If there is enough of love, anything is possible.” She raised her plump hand. “Oh, I’m not being a romantic fool. I only mean that if there is enough of passion.... If you believe that it is the greatest thing of all, worth all else in the world, then take what life can give you. Let nothing stop you. It will come to an end soon enough and you will be unhappy, but you must understand that in the beginning. If you are to have remorse, have it before you act and be done with it.... That is the only rule for intelligent people, and they are after all the only ones who dare know such a rule.”
For a time Ellen sat quietly regarding the floor, lost in consideration of all her companion had said. It was a bewildering speech and colossally unmoral. She must have thought, then or later, of the vast distance which separated the girl who sat in Mrs. Callendar’s drawing-room from the girl who sat on Hattie Tolliver’s knee the night that Jimmy Seton rang the bell and brought Clarence into her life; yet she had only gone a little way. Turning the speech of Mrs. Callendar over and over in her mind, she became aware that it savored curiously of Lily. It was a consciousness always present, an awareness of Lily’s charm, her beauty, her curious soft independence, the beauty, the talk, the scandal that centered about her.... If Hattie Tolliver could have known it, the influence of wicked Lily was stronger at that moment than it had ever been. Out of all the talk, the experience, the sorrow, Lily was emerging slowly from the well of mystery that engulfed her.
“It is impossible,” said Ellen slowly, “because I could not marry him.” She hesitated for a moment and then added in a whisper, “I have a husband already.... I’ve never told any one.”
She began to weep once more, gently and wearily, while Mrs. Callendar, poised and remote in black satin and diamonds, regarded her with an expression of astonishment.
At last the older woman said, “You should have told me this. It changes everything. Sabine told me that you had a lover ... that she had seen him at your flat.”
“That was my husband.”
“You never spoke of him, so we had nothing else to believe.” She smiled suddenly and touched Ellen’s hand once more. “I was right then. I did not believe it possible.”
Ellen looked at her silently, in amazement. “But you had me to your house, as a friend. How could you have done that when you thought me a woman of that sort?”