"'You didn't notice, but I was looking more at you than at him when he came in through that window. I didn't doubt what he had come for, you see—those "hay-making" words so long ago.... And as I looked at you, your face closed, a sphinx whose only secret was indifference, I suddenly thought, "Well, we will, indeed we will!" With a vicious kind of gaiety.... Oh don't you see, in the state I was in you seemed to have justified me! You were the only person I could put beside Antony, and ever so much higher with only a real smile from you to unscrew me—but you didn't care at all, at all! A queen who didn't care enough about her kingdom even to try to rule it....
"'There's no good, Iris, in indulging any creepy feelings about Antony having come to turn my luck, by force of evil or any other such stuff. No black magic about Antony—his magic was never but schoolboy red, at its worst. And, anyway, my luck had begun to turn before I saw him; I knew it was turning because I seemed to have lost some of my confidence, I wasn't so sure of my insight. I felt worn thin, you know, like a coin kept too long in circulation.... But what Antony did do was to help matters along. His very presence helped me to let things rip, and how wildly! With luck going from bad to worse, and not the devil of a win anywhere. And good money rushing away after bad, running hell-for-leather after it, money thrown wildly to win back what had been lost wildly, like any amateur.... And Antony all the while chuckling at my elbow, as I'd sign away some more on a jumpy market. Not that I minded his chuckling! I rather liked it, in fact. I was very interested in his consistency, never before having been really face to face with this blessed obsession of his; and found myself enjoying the simplicity of it, the simplicity of this thing that had clouded his whole life, and mine too! A marvellous and deferential hatred I found it, with a large, full-blooded malice about it that was as different from the petty malice in ordinary circulation as a sabre from a paper-knife; bitter enough, of course, when in self-defence you dammed it up, but once you let it have its run a very genial and naïve part of him; and certainly the most reliable.... It was as though we were children again, and I paying for his escapades while he grinned impishly and admiringly from a corner.
"'But as we pegged away at our foolishness in the City, every bit as seriously as though we were actually making money, I kept on thinking of you. In spite of Antony and my interest in him, you came into my mind more and more. I thought and wondered about you. And I realised that I knew no more of you than if you had been a strange, beautiful woman whom I had met and loved in a lane, and who had passed me by and away with a quivering, careless look. I knew you so little that I wondered what you would think when the crash came, as I saw that it must come, probably sooner than later. I had often wondered before why you had not asked me to give you your freedom, but now I would offer it to you, and you couldn't but take it. Maybe you would marry Ronnie, I thought. And I would take Antony away with me, perhaps to the South Seas.... You see, dear, Antony seemed inevitable in my life, fatally inevitable, while I have never been able to think of you as that, but as something outside my life that I always longed to bring into it. But I had thrown away that hope.
"'I told you, didn't I, that I hadn't reckoned what a bad loser I fundamentally was until I had lost? Well, I hadn't reckoned with the deuce it would play with my health. But, my darling, if I'm grateful to anything in this world it's for that weakness, for it has given me a vision of you, it has given me the "you" that I am talking to now. As I lost all my confidence, everything about me that I had treasured, all those baubles of my luck, I seemed to feel a cloud settling about my head—and I could see you more clearly through that cloud than ever I had through daylight. You grew vivid, touchable, more than ever Iris. At last, I saw you, and I knew—oh, I knew so much that I hadn't known! And since then, Iris, I've tried, I have tried so hard, but it was too late. I hadn't dreamt of the depths of Antony's consistency....'
"It was curious, Ronnie, how he seemed to bring my temper round in a circle to that same stiffening point against him. He seemed always to end on that angering weakness, resignedly implying some hurt to us both. But I didn't understand what he meant by his 'too late,' he had said it so inconsequently. His eyes never left my face, I knew he wanted to touch me, wanted me to go to him, that very moment—but my back was stiff against him, I could not move nor speak until I had heard about this new terror to our love, that had suffered so many.
"'That oil,' he explained hurriedly, and with a sudden harshness. 'I told you that Antony had worked out an idea how to use it, didn't I? And a damned cunning swindle Cascan Oil was, as efficient a bubble as ever swindled money out of the public. Antony and that engineer got their own back on that oil right enough. And it took me in at first—me, of all people! For, when I said I didn't mind helping Antony let things rip, I didn't mean to let him drag my name through the mud. But he did. And when I found the thing was a barefaced swindle, with just a plausible crust over it, and that it was only an amazing kind of chance that had so far hidden it—my good-luck again, you see, just the swan-song of it, for bubbles aren't so easy to blow as they were—it was too late for me to get out. I had to go on and try to mend it. My name was tacked on to most of the papers.... I think I must have been mad during those first few months after Antony's return not to have enquired more closely—and mad not to have realised the depths of his madness! But I had never dreamed that he wanted to bring my part of the name down even lower than his! I found it out about six weeks ago. Just about the same time that I found you out, Iris, that I found out you did love me—you do, don't you? I can't tell you any more than you can guess about those two realisations, angel and bogey to happen at the same time! But what was the use of cursing Antony? I ought to have known about him. My fault for being a fool, rather than his for being so insanely consistent. And if it hadn't been for you, for what you suddenly meant, I wouldn't have kicked so much, for there's always one way out of these things. But I did kick—Iris, I've worked in the last month as I never thought to work, to try and raise the money to pay off the holders, to stave off the certain discovery or make it better when discovered. That was "the way out" I told you about, you remember?... And I came home to lunch to-day to tell you that I've done all I could—and that now there's nothing but a miracle between me and the police.'
"I haven't any memory left for what I actually said or did then, Ronnie. And I've read somewhere that despair keeps no diary. He threw those last words at me, just threw them, as though he was past caring how brutally he got rid of them—and, at the end of the fuse he had been lighting all the afternoon, they simply burnt up my nerves. I was hysterical, perhaps.... Anyway, the very next moment we seemed to be standing together, weirdly almost fighting; but it was only that he had me by the shoulder, very close to him, shaking me a little. And I staring blindly at him, and he trembling with a feverish impatience.
"'For God's sake don't go on about it, Iris, else I won't be able to bear it at all. I wish I hadn't told you now—but, my dear, I had to tell you, I had to tell you the whole thing. No one but you matters in my life—and I had to tell you why I can't matter in yours any more. Antony's got what he never dreamed to get, he's got me to hate him at last.... Oh, but that's just nonsense. He doesn't matter any more, he might be dead or alive for all I care. Nothing matters but you....'
"I think I said something about our having to run away, quickly. I must have repeated that several times, for he was staring down at me so thoughtfully that he seemed already to have run away, a thousand miles away.
"'Yes,' he said, but ever so vaguely, 'we might do that. There'll be no cry for two or three days. Longer perhaps, if I can arrange things. Yes, we might run for it. I'll see.... But there will be no happiness for us now, Iris. I know.'