“Perhaps we'd better not go into that now,” David said hastily. “It's natural that the readjustments will take time.”
“We'll have to go into it. It's the hardest thing I have to face.”
“It's not dead, then?”
“No,” Dick said slowly. “It's not dead, David. And I'd better bring it into the open. I've fought it to the limit by myself. It's the one thing that seems to have survived the shipwreck. I can't argue it down or think it down.”
“Maybe, if you see Elizabeth—”
“I'd break her heart, that's all.”
He tried to make David understand. He told in its sordid details his failure to kill it, his attempts to sink memory and conscience in Chicago and their failure, the continued remoteness of Elizabeth and what seemed to him the flesh and blood reality of the other woman. That she was yesterday, and Elizabeth was long ago.
“I can't argue it down,” he finished. “I've tried to, desperately. It's a—I think it's a wicked thing, in a way. And God knows all she ever got out of it was suffering. She must loathe the thought of me.”
David was compelled to let it rest there. He found that Dick was doggedly determined to see Beverly Carlysle. After that, he didn't know. No man wanted to surrender himself for trial, unless he was sure himself of whether he was innocent or guilty. If there was a reasonable doubt—but what did it matter one way or the other? His place was gone, as he'd made it, gone if he was cleared, gone if he was convicted.
“I can't come back, David. They wouldn't have me.”