I suffered greatly during those hours—how greatly no one but myself will ever know. The whole thing came so unexpectedly; I had always trusted Ruth so implicitly. The fact that a thing so unsavory, so sordid, should come to me, of all people, almost unnerved me. A marriage of one of the Durrants to be so besmirched! It was almost unbelievable.
Such things had happened to others. That I could understand. But when I had selected Ruth for my wife, I had been confident of her worth—her breeding, her very manner seemed to make such a catastrophe as this impossible. Yet it had come and I had to face it—make the best of it—hide it from the world as my mother would have done. Our marriage must go on, of course, but it would never be for me that it had been.
I found Ruth sitting on her bed staring blankly before her.
“Well?” I said; I felt that in justice to myself I should be harsh in this interview. “Well, what have you to say for yourself?”
She stared at me with a light in her eyes that made me doubt her sanity.
“Nothing,” she said, in that irritating, soft voice of hers. “I don’t know—I cannot think—what to do.”
I leaned against the wall just inside the doorway. I was quite calm; I even permitted myself to smile.
“Won’t you go away now?” she added, almost in a whisper. “You must leave me alone—I must think—decide—”
She seemed to be still on the verge of hysteria and I concluded it would be useless for me to go on talking then.
“It is a great shock to me,” I said deliberately, “to find that of all the women in the world I should have chosen one who was bad.”