My heart fell, and I waited for my husband's answer. I was stifling.
"All right, Hobson. If it must be, it must," he answered.
I wanted to speak, but I did not know what to say. There seemed to be nothing that I could say.
A quarter of an hour afterwards we arrived at the hotel, where the proprietor, attended by the manageress and the waiters, received us with rather familiar smiles.
THIRTY-FIFTH CHAPTER
When I began to write I determined to tell the truth and the whole truth. But now I find that the whole truth will require that I should invade some of the most sacred intimacies of human experience. At this moment I feel as if I were on the threshold of one of the sanctuaries of a woman's life, and I ask myself if it is necessary and inevitable that I should enter it.
I have concluded that it is necessary and inevitable—necessary to the sequence of my narrative, inevitable for the motive with which I am writing it.
Four times already I have written what is to follow. In the first case I found that I had said too much. In the second I had said too little. In the third I was startled and shocked by the portrait I had presented of myself and could not believe it to be true. In the fourth I saw with a thrill of the heart that the portrait was not only true, but too true. Let me try again.
I entered our rooms at the hotel, my husband's room and mine, with a sense of fear, almost of shame. My sensations at that moment had nothing in common with the warm flood of feeling which comes to a woman when she finds herself alone for the first time with the man she loves, in a little room which holds everything that is of any account to her in the world. They were rather those of a young girl who, walking with a candle through the dark corridors of an empty house at night, is suddenly confronted by a strange face. I was the young girl with the candle; the strange face was my husband's.