"Perhaps not. That doesn't prevent my thinking of you. But I was thinking of myself, too. Supposing I had done this thing that you would have loathed; even though you had never known it, I should have felt that I had betrayed your trust, that I had taken something from you that I had no right to take, something that you would never have given me if you had known. What was I to do?"
She did not answer him. Once before, he remembered, when his honour was in difficulties, she had refused to help it out, left it to struggle to the light; which was what it did now.
"It would have been better to have said nothing and done nothing."
He expected her to close instantly with that view of his behaviour which honour had presented as the final one, but this she did not do.
"If you had said nothing you might have done what you liked."
"I see. It's my saying it that makes the difference?"
"That is not what I meant. I meant that you were free to publish what you have written. You are not free to say these things to me."
"For the life of me I don't know why I said them. It means perdition for my poems and for me. I knew that was all I had to gain by telling you the truth."
"But it isn't the truth. You know it isn't. You don't even think it is."
"And if it were, would it be so terrible to you to hear it?"