“Leyton Marsh. Up in the north east, by the Lea, you know.”
“I certainly don’t know. Is that where you usually take your evening walks when dining in Kensington?”
“Well, sometimes. It’s the way to Walthamstow, you see. I know some people there.”
“Really. You do, as the rationalist bishop told you, touch a very extensive circle, certainly. And so you met one of them on this marsh, and the pleasure of their society was such——”
“She wasn’t well, and I took her back to where she lived. She lives in Kensington, so it took ages; then I had to get back to Compton Street to dress. Really, I’m awfully sorry.”
Mrs. Crawford’s eyebrows conveyed attention to the sex of the friend; then she resumed conversation with the barrister on her right.
Molly said consolingly, “Don’t you mind, Eddy. She doesn’t really. She only pretends to, for fun. She knows it wasn’t your fault. Of course you had to take your friend home if she wasn’t well.”
“I couldn’t have left her, as a matter of fact. She was frightfully unhappy and unhinged.... It was Mrs. Le Moine.” He conquered a vague reluctance and added this. He was not going to have the vestige of a secret from Molly.
She flushed quickly and said nothing, and he knew that he had hurt her. Yet it was an unthinkable alternative to conceal the truth from her; equally unthinkable not to do these things that hurt her. What then, would be the solution? Simply he did not know. A change of attitude on her part seemed to him the only possible one, and he had waited now long for that in vain. To avert her sombreness and his, he began to talk cheerfully to her about all manner of things, and she responded, but not quite spontaneously. A shadow lay between them.
So obvious was it that after dinner he told her so, in those words.