“What is it exactly that you wish to know?”
For a moment Dion was silent. In the darkness of the pavilion he saw Dumeny’s lips smiling faintly, Hadi Bey’s vivid, self-possessed eyes, the weak mouth of Brayfield and his own double. Was he a member of an ugly brotherhood, or did he stand alone? He wanted to know, yet he felt that he could not put such a hideous question to his companion.
“Tell me exactly what it is,” she said. “Don’t be afraid. I wish to be quite sincere with you, though you think I don’t. It is no pleasure to me to deceive people. What I do in the way of deception I do in self-defense. Circumstances often push us into doing what we don’t enjoy doing. But you and I ought to be frank with one another.”
Her hands tightened on his.
“Go on. Tell me.”
“I’ve been wondering whether your husband ought to have won his case,” said Dion, in a low voice.
“Is that all?” she said, very simply and without any emotion.
“All?”
“Yes. Do you suppose, when I gave myself to you, I didn’t realize that my doing it was certain to make you doubt my virtue? Dion, you don’t know how boyish you still are. You will always be in some ways a boy. I knew you would doubt me after all that had happened. But what is the good of asking questions of a women whom you doubt? If I am what you suspect, of course I shall tell lies. If I am not, what is the good of my telling you the truth? What is to make you believe it?”
He was silent. She moved slightly and he felt her thin body against his side. What sort of weapon was she? That was the great question for him. Since his struggle in the forest of Defetgamm he had come to the resolve to strike fierce and reiterated blows on that disabling and surely contemptible love of his, that love which had confronted him like a specter when he was in the pavilion with Jimmy. He was resolved at last upon assassination, and he wanted a weapon that could slay, not a weapon that would bend, or perhaps break, in his hand.