“What are you going to do about it?”
And I talked myself out a second time, until the fever left me and I lay back on the rug, almost too much exhausted to move or think. Physical infidelity, committed in a moment of passion, stood in relation to this long infidelity of spirit as a blow struck in hot blood stands to a calculated and artfully concealed murder. Had Barbara left me and come back, as Sonia left and came back to Raney, I believe I could have forgiven her. After deceiving me once, she could deceive me again; to get what she wanted, in her own way, she would sacrifice me as she had sacrificed Jack Waring and Eric Lane.
It was all over. And I wanted her desperately. And it was all over.
Hitherto, I had always pretended that there was something I did not understand in her tragic entanglements: Jack and Eric were straight as the day; if they both fled from the woman they both loved, I wished to think that they were parted by a lover’s quarrel which both were too proud or obstinate to heal; I refused to believe that they had run from her in disgust.
“I’m here because Barbara will soon be coming back to London,” I told O’Rane. “I . . . couldn’t divorce her if I wanted to; but I can let her divorce me.” . . .
“She won’t be very . . . happy alone,” he answered reflectively. “When Jack Waring disappeared, she turned to Eric out of sheer loneliness and misery; when Eric went, she turned to you. If you go, George, she’ll turn to some one else. A married woman without children, without a husband, more lonely and miserable than ever before . . . Well, you won’t have long to wait for your divorce.”
Four-and-twenty hours earlier, I should have called my best friend to account if he had warned me that Barbara needed watching. Now she had convicted herself and robbed me of all temptation to defend her.
“I don’t see much difference,” I said, “between the woman who runs away with a man and the woman who only stays at home because the man won’t run away with her.”
“There’s still a difference between the woman who keeps her reputation and the woman who loses it. When women become reckless . . . It’s a big responsibility to give them the first push down the slope.”
The short sunlight of late autumn was fading; and I busied myself with packing our luncheon-basket. As I had not asked for sympathy, I could not complain if none was offered.