I hope I have made you understand how good he was, with what simple sort of goodness, not meant to stand the strain of the complexity in which he found himself. He wanted desperately to get out of it, to get in touch again with straight and simple lines of living. As he stood before me then his face was streaked red and white with the stress of the situation, like a man after a great bodily exertion. I was moved suddenly to spare him—after all what was the village dressmaker to us? Tommy flared out at me.
"She is as good as you are ... she's as pure ... as kind-hearted. It's as much your fault as anybody's. You were away; you were always away." His voice trailed out into extenuation. There fell a long pause in which several things became clear to me.
"Tell me," I said at last.
Tommy sat down on the red plush couch. He had taken off his coat downstairs, for the evening was warm. There was pink in his necktie and the freckles stood out across his nose. I was taken with a wild sense of the ridiculous. Miss Rathbone, I knew, was six years my husband's senior.
"I went there a good deal last winter," he began. "I never meant any harm ... my business partner ... it was lonesome here. Of course I ought to have known people would talk. Nobody told me. She was brave, she bore it a long time, and then I saw that something was the matter. I didn't know until she told me, how fond of her I was——"
"Tommy, Tommy!" Strangely, it was I crying out. "Fond of her? Fond of her?"
"I was fond of her," he insisted dully. "She suffered a lot on account of me." The words dropped to me through immeasurable cold space. I believe there were more explanations, excusings. I was aware of being wounded in some far, unreachable place. I sat stunned and watched the widening rings of pain and amazement spread toward me. By and by tears came; I cried long and quietly. I got down on the floor at my husband's knees and put my arms about his body, crying. After a time I remember his helping me to undress and we got into bed. We had but the one. I know it now for the sign that I never loved my husband as wives should love, that I felt no offence in this; sex jealousy was not awake in me. We lay in bed with our arms around one another and cried for the pain and bewilderment of what had happened to us.
CHAPTER X
As if the attraction Miss Rathbone had for my husband had been a spell, the mere naming of which dissipated it, we spent the ensuing three or four days in the glow of renewal. It was Miss Rathbone herself who drew us out of that excluding intimacy; set us apart where we could feel the cold stiffness of our hurts and the injury we had inflicted each on the other.