Irene allowed him to perform his usual little courtesies of tenderness in making her comfortable before the fire, and thanked him in the even voice that smote him deeper than anger or fierce reproach. He stood beside her, hands on hips, his customary attitude.
“Shall I begin from the beginning? Well, it is the usual thing. Adam set the example, stereotyped the excuse. The woman tempted me. A man is a threadbare creature when you hold him up to the light. Or to put things another way: I loved a star—the better part of me; the lower part plucked the first wayside flower to hand——”
He broke off, paced impatiently the verge of carpet adjoining the polished strip of floor that ran from the doorway to the fireplace wall.
“I can’t talk of it to you. It is horrible. I loved you all the time, remember. I behaved like a blackguard to her. I don’t want to justify myself——”
He paused, as if expecting her to reply, but she looked steadfastly at the fire and gave no sign of heeding. The lines had deepened in her face, the youth had gone out of it. Her age was two and thirty. She looked five years older.
“I am going into rhodomontades,” he said. “I will just tell you the facts.”
He began at his first meeting with Minna, described their courtship, marriage, quarrel, the whole miserable story of their lives. He sought neither to spare himself nor to paint himself in Mephistophelian colours. Too proud to plead extenuation, he forced himself to state facts baldly. A note of pleading in his voice might have touched the tenderer chords in Irene, but his tale left her cold, angered, her heart unconvinced. When he had finished he sat down in the chair opposite her, and there was a long silence.
“Do you still reproach me so bitterly for deceiving you?” he asked at length.
She looked round at him wearily. She had not spoken a word since he had begun his tale.
“I can’t reproach you for being different from what I thought you. You acted well, my reason tells me, according to your lights, but—I thought your lights were different. At first I could not conceive how you left me in ignorance. I need not say that if you had told me the woman was your wife, I should not have questioned you further.”