"I tried twice, but it was no good. I suppose I didn't try hard enough."
"What good would you have done by going, if she wanted you to stay?"
"That's how I argued. But the fact is, I stayed because I couldn't go away. Of course, it was an abominable position, but I assure you it felt like heaven when it didn't feel like 'ell."
His anguish, mercifully, was too great for him to feel the horror of his lapse. And Kitty hardly noticed it; at any rate she never felt the smallest inclination to smile, not even in recalling it afterwards.
It was, if you came to think of it, an unusual, a remarkable confession. But she remembered that he had had a nervous fever; it was his nerves, then, and his fever that had cried out, a cry covered, made decent almost, by the clangour of the sea.
She wondered how it came that, when her mind was as full as it could be of Lucia and her affairs, it could give such concentrated attention to him and his. If he had been what the tortoiseshell eye-glass took him for, a common man, it ought to have been easy and natural to dismiss him. But she could not dismiss him. There was some force in him, not consciously exerted, which held her there on that conspicuous seat beside him under the gaze of the tortoiseshell eye-glass. Kitty was by no means deficient in what she had called "profane fancy," and she felt to her finger tips that she was making a spectacle of herself at the end of the esplanade. Their backs at this moment she knew must be standing out very clear and bold against the sky-line. But she herself was losing the keen sense she had once had of his inappropriateness to the scenes he moved in. Wherever he was he was natural; he was (she had it in one word) sincere, as few people are sincere nowadays. He was not a common man. That was it. All along it had been the justification of their strange proceedings, this fact that he was not common, that he was indeed unique. On that ground Lucia had always met him, and she had ignored the rest. Kitty was trying to sympathize with Lucia.
"But," he went on, simply, "I can't tell her that."
"No, you can't tell her that, but you can tell her everything else. Look here, supposing that instead of sitting here tearing your nervous system to tatters you go straight away and do it."
"What will she think of me?"
"Think of you? If she thinks of you at all, she'll bless you for having spared her father's memory up to the last possible minute."