She turned her head away. And that turning away was intolerable. It was the closing of the door.
"Is it so very terrible to you?" he said gently.
He could not see the tears in her eyes, but he heard them in her voice, and he knew that he had wounded her, Hot in her pride, but in her tenderness and honour—Lucia's honour.
"To me? I'm not thinking of myself—not of myself at all. How could I think of myself? I'm thinking of her." She turned to him and let her tears gather in her eyes unheeded. "Don't you see what you've done?"
Oh, yes; he saw very well what he had done. He had taken the friendship she had given to him to last his life and destroyed it in a moment, with his own hands. All for the sake of a subtlety, a fantastic scruple, a question asked, a thing said under some obscure compulsion. He had been moved by he knew not what insane urgency of honour. And whatever else he saw he did not see how he could have done otherwise. The only alternative was to say nothing, to do nothing. Supposing he had suppressed both his passion and the poems that immortalized it, what would she have thought of him then? Would she not have thought that he had either dedicated to her a thing that he was afterwards ashamed of, or that he had meant nothing by the dedication?
"Don't you see what you have done?" she said. "You've made me wish I had never come here and that I'd never seen you again. It was only the other night—the dear little girl—she came up here and sat with me, and we had a talk. We talked about you. She told me how she came to know you, and how good you'd been to her and how long it was before either of you knew. She told me things about herself. She is very shy—very reserved—but she let me see how much she cares—and how much you care. Think what you must be to her. She has no father and no mother, she has nobody but you. She told me that. And then—she took me up to her room and showed me all her pretty things. She was so happy—and how can I look at her again? She would hate me if she knew; and I couldn't blame her, poor child. She could never understand that it was not my fault."
But as she said it her conscience rose in contradiction and told her that it was her fault. Her fault in the very beginning for drawing him into an intimacy that his youth and inexperience made dangerous. Her fault for sacrificing, yes, sacrificing him to that impulse to give pleasure which had only meant giving pleasure to herself at his expense. Her fault for endlessly refining on the facts of life, till she lost all feeling of its simpler and more obvious issues. Kitty had been right when she told her that she treated men as if they were disembodied spirits. She had trusted too much to her own subtlety. That was how all her blunders, had been made. If she had been cold as well as subtle—but Lucia was capable of passionate indiscreet things to be followed by torments of her pride. Her pride had only made matters worse. It was her pride, in the beginning, that had blinded her. When she had told Kitty that she was not the sort of woman to let this sort of thing happen with this sort of man, she had summed up her abiding attitude to one particular possibility. She had trusted to the social gulf to keep her safe, apart. Afterwards, she knew that she had not trusted so much to the social gulf. She had not been quite so proud; neither, since Kitty had opened her eyes, had she been so blind; but she had been ten times more foolish. Her mind had refused to dwell upon Kitty's dreadful suggestions, because they were dreadful. Unconscious of her sex, she had remained unconscious of her power; she had trusted (unconsciously) to the power of another woman for protection. Flossie had, so to speak, detached and absorbed the passionate part of Keith Rickman; by which process the rest of him was left subtler and more pure. She had thought she could really deal with him now as a disembodied spirit. And so under the shelter of his engagement she had, after her own manner, let herself go.
These thoughts swept through her brain like one thought, as she contemplated the misery she had made. They came with the surging of the blood in her cheeks, so swiftly that she had no time to see that they hardly exhausted the aspects of her case. And it was not her own case that she was thinking of.
She turned to him pleading. "Don't you see that I could never forgive myself if I thought that I had hurt her? You are not going to make me so unhappy?"
"Do you mean, am I going to marry her?"