Delight rose and drew down her veil with hands that Audrey saw were trembling a little.
“How can he make his own decision?” she asked. “He may think it's his own, but it's hers, Mrs. Spencer's. She's always talking, always. And she's plausible. She can make him think black is white, if she wants to.”
“Why don't you talk to him?”
“I? He'd think I'd lost my mind! Besides, that isn't it. If you—like a man, you want him to do the right thing because he wants to, not because a girl asks him to.”
“I wonder,” Audrey said, slowly, “if he's worth it, Delight?”
“Worth what?” She was startled.
“Worth your—worth our worrying about him.”
But she did not need Delight's hasty and flushed championship of Graham to tell her what she already knew.
After she had gone, Audrey sat alone in her empty rooms and faced a great temptation. She was taking herself out of Clayton's life. She knew that she would be as lost to him among the thousands of workers in the munition plant as she would have been in Russia. According to Clare, he rarely went into the shops themselves, and never at night.
Of course “out of his life” was a phrase. They would meet again. But not now, not until they had had time to become resigned to what they had already accepted. The war would not last forever. And then she thought of their love, which had been born and had grown, always with war at its background. They had gone along well enough until this winter, and then everything had changed. Chris, Natalie, Clayton, herself—none of them were quite what they had been. Was that one of the gains of war, that sham fell away, and people revealed either the best or the worst in them?