This, she seemed to say, is how I deal with cowardice.
That she had compromised herself by dealing with it in this way had simply never occurred to her. It couldn't. She didn't know and wouldn't have believed it possible that people did these things.
What had frightened her, she said, was Jimmy's saying that about keeping the other places till they could see them together. He meant, you see, till they were married. It brought it so home to her. And it brought home to her what it meant to him. Because he couldn't afford to marry yet for ages.
If she'd gone back, she said, it would have been so cruel to him. And it would have been so cruel to herself, too.
Then she told me what they had done together. Heavens! How she must have trusted him. She joined him here in Bruges. And they'd gone to Antwerp, then to Ghent, then back to Bruges. (I had followed close on their traces, a day behind them at each city.)
And it had all been so beautiful. She simply couldn't tell me how beautiful it had been. It was as if she had never seen anything properly before.
Jimmy had made her see things. "I can understand," she said, "what he meant when he said that the beauty of this place hurt him. It hurts me."
I reminded her that Jimmy had said it hurt him because she wasn't there.
She looked up and smiled. "He isn't here now, Furny."
I took her to Ostend first thing in the morning and saw her on to the boat. I advised her to remove the foreign labels from her trunk at Dover, and to contrive so that she shouldn't be seen arriving by the up platform at Canterbury.