"But it takes two to make a quarrel. Why did she quarrel with you?"
"I tell you, she had been drinking."
"But, even then, what did she say to you, or what did you say to her, which could have caused such a disturbance? Because, I can see, from your own statements, that both of you had lost your tempers."
I was silent. I knew not what to answer.
"I suppose that the woman was a stranger to you--that you had never seen her before?"
What could I say? I felt that if I did not tell the truth then it would come out afterwards. Better, while I was about it, make a clean breast of everything.
And yet I found it hard. Lucy's ideas are narrow. She has her own views of things, and strong views some of them are. She thinks, for instance, that there ought to be the same standard for a man as for a woman: the same moral standard--that a man ought to come to his wife with clean hands, in the same sense in which a woman ought to come with clean hands to her husband. I am afraid that I had been rather in the habit of finding favour in her eyes by endorsing her opinions. It seemed hard that the only real peccadillo of which I had been guilty should be cropping up against me after all this lapse of time. I had repented of it, and put it behind me, long ago; and yet here it was, as fresh and vigorous as ever, rising to confront me from its tomb.
Lucy seemed struck by my continued silence. She repeated her question in an altered form. "Had you seen her before?"
"Many years ago."
"Many years ago? You knew her, then?"