“Anything for excitement,” she said, with her slow smile. “La petite Anne is éprise. Be quite attentive, Davy. You’ll land her. Now you are angry, but it seems so natural to have you angry at me!”
“Since when have you danced in public?” I said, unwilling to show her my disgust and my rage. “And why now?”
“It isn’t fair to the man, do you think?” she said softly.
I stopped abruptly. What devil had made her say this I don’t know: but she was right. I have danced with hundreds of women, and never been conscious of what I held in my arms,—until that dance with Letty.
“Thank you; I must see to something,” I said, leaving her abruptly, and making a pretext of examining the tree, I went out into the cold air, past the lanterned courtyard, and down the crunching way to the old wooden bridge by the duck pond.
* * * * *
What a hideous situation, and how my whole being revolted at the part I was forced to play! It is at such moments that the old instinct of superstition that lies dormant in each of us comes insistently back. I know that in my old worldly wisdom I have scoffed at Sunday-school morality and have seen as many sinners succeed as fail. Yet at such moments when fate overtakes me I go back to my childhood terror of pulpit thunderings and feel the avenging justice of the Old Testament at my back. It is no use repeating to myself that other men have done much worse than I have done and, the memory dropping away from them, become pillars of respectability. I feel the ominous pursuit of consequences and hear the bitter cry of conscience,—“The wages of sin is death.” Perhaps there are moments so personal in our lives that all morality returns into one individual experience, and right and wrong are momentarily but our superstitious estimate of cause and effect as it suddenly grips us.
Even as, in the bitter nausea of enforced hypocrisy, I stood there in the darkness, a prey to my remorse, I heard a step and knew that my brother was seeking me out.
“Is that you, Ben?”
“I saw you leave.”