“I know,” said he quickly, “I was there.”
He saw that she was in the grip of an emotional revulsion and wished he could stop her. But he couldn't. Suddenly she seemed like a little girl.
“Don't you see, Henry!” She threw out her hands. “Do you think it would be any good—now—to tell me I'm not partly responsible. If I—if—” she caught herself, stiffened up; there was a touch of her old downrightness in the way she came out with, “Henry, he wouldn't have—killed himself!” Her voice was a whisper. “He wouldn't!”
The Worm smoked and smoked. He couldn't tell her that he regarded her father as a hypocritical old crook, and that her early revolt against the home within which the man had always wished to confine her had, as he saw it, grown out of a sound instinct. You couldn't expect her, now, to get all that into any sort of perspective. Her revolt dated back to her girlish struggle to get away to school and later, to college. Sue was forgetting now how much of this old story she had let him see in their many talks. Why, old Wilde had tried to change the course of her college studies to head her away from modernism into the safer channels of pietistic tradition. The Worm couldn't forgive him for that. And then, the man's dreadful weekly, and his curious gift of using his great emotional power to draw immense sums of money from thousands of faithful readers in small towns and along country lanes, he hadn't killed himself on Sue's account.
It was known, now, that the man had lived in an awful fear. It was known that he had the acid right at hand in both office and home, the acid he had finally drunk.... She was speaking.
The Worm smoked on.
“I wonder if you really know what happened.”
“What happened?” he repeated, all at sea.
“You must have seen the drift of it—of what I didn't tell you at one time or another.” He saw now that she was talking of her own experiences. He had to make a conscious struggle to bring his mind up out of those ugly depths and listen to her. She went on. “It has been fine, Henry, the way I could always talk to you. Our friendship—”
She began in another way. “It's the one thing I owe to Jacob Zanin. He told me the blunt truth—about myself. It did hurt, Henry. But even then I knew it for the truth.... You know how he feels about marriage and the home”—she glanced up at the bare kitchen walls—“all that.”