"Not so much as you think. Remember, she doesn't care for me. She's not like you, Anne. She's frightfully cold."
As he said it there came to her a sudden awful intimation of reality, a sense that behind all their words, all the piled-up protection of their outward thinking, there hid an unknown certainty, a certainty that would wreck them if they knew it. It was safer not to know, to go on hiding behind those piled-up barriers of thought. But an inward, ultimate honesty drove her to her questioning.
"Are you sure she's cold?"
"Absolutely sure. You go on thinking all the time that she's like you, that she takes things as hard as you do; but she doesn't. She doesn't feel as you do. It won't hurt her as it would hurt you if I left you for somebody else."
"But—it'll hurt her."
"It's better to hurt her a little now than to go on humbugging and shamming till she finds out. That would hurt her damnably. She'd hate our not being straight with her. But if we tell her the truth she'll understand. I'm certain she'll understand and she'll forgive you. She can't be hard on you for caring for me."
"Even if she doesn't care?"
"She cares for you," he said.
She couldn't push it from her, that importunate sense of a certainty that was not his certainty. If Maisie did care for him Jerrold wouldn't see it. He never saw what he didn't want to see.
"Supposing she does care all the time? How do you know she doesn't?"