"Dominic," she said breathlessly, "do you at all know that you've just told me means to me?"
"I have never known positively until now; but it was impossible that I should not have entertained suspicions."
"Did he—you know who I mean—ever speak of me?"
"I think," Iglesias said, "he came very near doing so, more than once. But I put a stop to the conversation."
"You frightened him," Poppy rejoined. "I know one could do that. It was a last resource, a hateful one. Is there anything so difficult to forgive as being driven to be cruel? One was bound to be cruel in self-defence, or one would have been stifled, utterly degraded by self-contempt, bled to death not only in respect of money but of self-esteem."
She threw up her hands with a gesture at once fierce and despairing.
"Oh! the weak, the weak," she cried, "of how many crimes they are the authors! Crimes more particularly abominable when the weak one is the man, and woman—poor brute—is strong."
She settled herself sideways in the corner of the carriage, turning her face once more full upon her companion.
"Look here," she said, "I don't want to whitewash myself. What I've done I've done. I don't pretend it's pretty or innocent, or that I haven't jolly well got to pay the price of it—though I think a good deal has been paid by now. But it seems to me my real crime was in marrying him, rather than in leaving him. It was a crime against love—love, which alone, if you've any real sense of the inherent decencies of things, makes marriage otherwise than an outrage upon a woman's pride and her virtue. But, then, one doesn't know all that when one's barely out of one's teens. And, you see, like a fool I took the first comer out of bravado, just that people mightn't see how awfully hard hit I was by his people interfering and preventing my marrying the poor, dear boy who gave me this"—Poppy spread out the end of her dragon scarf—"I've told you about him.—Stage people are absurdly simple in some ways, you know. They live in such a world of pretences and fictions that they lose their sense of fact, or rather they never develop it. They're awfully easily taken in. Words go a tremendous long way with them. And de Courcy could talk. He was appallingly fluent, specially on the subject of himself. He made be believe he was rather wonderful, and I wanted to believe he was wonderful. I wanted to believe he was all the geniuses in creation rolled into one. All the more I wanted to believe it because I wasn't one scrap in love with him."
Poppy beat with one hand almost roughly on Mr. Iglesias' arm.