“I am perfectly wide awake,” I said coldly. “I shall go to bed when I am entirely ready, and not before. And as for Jim’s conduct, I do not know much about the conventions in such cases, but if he wishes to embrace Miss Knowles, and she wants him to, the situation is interesting, but hardly novel.”
Aunt Selina rose slowly and drew the folds of her dressing gown around her, away from the contamination of my touch.
“Do you know what you are saying?” she demanded hoarsely.
“I do.” I was quite white and stiff from my knees up, but below I was wavery. I glanced at Jim for moral support, but he was looking idolatrously at Bella. As for her, quite suddenly she had dropped her mask of indifference; her face was strained and anxious, and there were deep circles I had not seen before, under her eyes. And it was Bella who finally threw herself into the breach—the family breach.
“It is all my fault, Miss Caruthers,” she said, stepping between Aunt Selina and myself. “I have been a blind and wicked woman, and I have almost wrecked two lives.”
Two! What of mine?
“You see,” she struggled on, against the glint in Aunt Selina’s eyes. “I—I did not realize how much I cared, until it was too late. I did so many things that were cruel and wrong—oh, Jim, Jim!”
She turned and buried her head on his shoulder and cried; real tears. I could hardly believe that it was Bella. And Jim put both his arms around her and almost cried, too, and looked nauseatingly happy with the eye he turned to Bella, and scared to death out of the one he kept on Aunt Selina.
She turned on me, as of course I knew she would.
“That,” she said, pointing at Jim and Bella, “that shameful picture is due to your own indifference. I am not blind; I have seen how you rejected all his loving advances.” Bella drew away from Jim, but he jerked her back. “If anything in the world would reconcile me to divorce, it is this unbelievable situation. James, are you shameless?”