"Then you, dear husband—dear love!—go and ask it for me! Must we not—oh! do see it as I do!—must we not somehow make it possible to be friends again, to wipe out that—that half-hour once for all?"—she threw out her hand in an impetuous gesture. "If you go, he will feel that is what we mean—he will understand us at once—there is nothing vile in him—nothing! Dear, he never said a word to me I could resent till this morning. And, alack, alack! was it somehow my fault?" She dropped her face a moment on the back of the chair she held. "How I am to play my own part—well! I must think. But I cannot have such a thing on my heart, Aldous—I cannot!"
He was silent a moment; then he said:
"Let me understand, at least, what it is precisely that we are doing. Is the idea that it should be made possible for us all to meet again as though nothing had happened?"
She shrank a moment from the man's common sense; then replied, controlling herself:
"Only not to leave the open sore—to help him to forget! He must know—he does know"—she held herself proudly—"that I have no secrets from you. So that when the time comes for remembering, for thinking it over, he will shrink from you, or hate you. Whereas, what I want"—her eyes filled with tears—"is that he should know you—only that! I ought to have brought it about long ago."
"Are you forgetting that I owe him this morning my political existence?"
The voice betrayed the inner passion.
"He would be the last person to remember it!" she cried. "Why not take it quite, quite simply?—behave so as to say to him, without words, 'Be our friend—join with us in putting out of sight what hurts us no less than you to think of. Shut the door upon the old room—pass with us into a new!'—oh! if I could explain!"
She hid her face in her hands again.
"I understand," he said, after a long pause. "It is very like you. I am not quite sure it is very wise. These things, to my mind, are best left to end themselves. But I promised Mrs. Allison; and what you ask, dear, you shall have. So be it."