"Then you should be very forgiving, Emile," Hermione said.
"And you?" he asked. "Are you, or would you be, forgiving?"
Maurice leaned forward on the table and looked at his wife with intensity.
"I hope so, but I don't think it would be for that—I mean because I thought the deed might not have been avoided. I think I should forgive because I pitied so, because I know how desperately unhappy I should be myself if I were to do a hateful thing, a thing that was exceptional, that was not natural to my nature as I had generally known it. When one really does love cleanliness, to have thrown one's self down deliberately in the mud, to see, to feel, that one is soiled from head to foot—that must be terrible. I think I should forgive because I pitied so. What do you say, Maurice?"
It was like a return to their talk in London at Caminiti's restaurant, when Hermione and Artois discussed topics that interested them, and Maurice listened until Hermione appealed to him for his opinion. But now he was more deeply interested than his companions.
"I don't know," he said. "I don't know about pitying and forgiving, but I expect you're right, Hermione."
"How?"
"In what you say about—about the person who's done the wrong thing feeling awful afterwards. And I think Monsieur Artois is right, too—about the hour of madness. I'm sure he is right. Sometimes an hour comes and one seems to forget everything in it. One seems not to be really one's self in it, but somebody else, and—and—"
Suddenly he seemed to become aware that, whereas Hermione and Artois had been considering a subject impersonally, he was introducing the personal element into the conversation. He stopped short, looked quickly from Hermione to Artois, and said:
"What I mean is that I imagine it's so, and that I've known fellows—in London, you know—who've done such odd things that I can only explain it like that. They must have—well, they must have gone practically mad for the moment. You—you see what I mean, Hermione?"