“Yes.”
Gaisford attacked his luncheon and ate for some moments without speaking.
“Is that prudent?,” he asked at length.
“I don’t suppose she’s very keen to meet me.”
The doctor threw up his hands and shook his head ruefully.
“Ah, my friend! That’s where you’re wrong. And your trade should have taught you better than that. A woman doesn’t throw aside a man she’s fond of, a man who was fond of her, if she can possibly keep him; it makes her feel warm and comfortable to have him at call. Mark my words: she’ll try to get you back! If her conscience is clear, she’ll want to prove it’s clear; if her conscience is not quite clear, she’ll never rest till she’s justified herself.”
Eric chewed his lips and looked away out of the window, afraid to trust his own voice.
“Marriage closes all accounts between us,” he muttered. “I’m starting afresh, I’m not going to think about the past, I’m going to forget... I wonder why she married George,” he added inconsequently.
“One woman in a hundred marries the man she wants,” answered Gaisford; “the other ninety-nine look for some one they can at least tolerate.” The bachelor’s love of generalizing about marriage went swiftly to the doctor’s head. “One man ripens the peach, and another always eats it.... Well, George has embarked on the great adventure with his eyes open: every one knows that he wanted to marry Amy Loring, only she was a Catholic; the other woman he’s very fond of, but she’s not the great love of his life. He felt it was time to get married; it was a passionless, restful, convenient marriage for both. Barbara’s last act of independence, by the way, was formally to cut herself adrift from her church....”
Eric felt that his friend was helping him to dismiss the subject with an irrelevancy; but, for all his talk of forgetting, he only wanted to fill in the blank pages of his tragedy. None knew the whole truth. Even the actors were familiar only with their own lines and scenes. Of the first act he himself only knew that Barbara had played with Jack Waring until he lost his head and embraced her faith in the hope of marrying her: she continued playing until a panic rush of superstition persuaded her that she had imperilled Jack’s soul and must offer herself blindly in reparation.... He did not know why Jack had cast her aside after keeping them both stretched on a rack for more than a year. And Jack did not know that his best friend prayed nightly for his death so that Barbara might be free to marry him. And, with her wild haze of superstition and conscience, devotion and vanity, passion and pose, no one could guess what Barbara knew....