No woman less exquisite in goodness could have moved her to this incredible remorse.  It took the whole of Maisie, in her unique perfection, to beat her and break her down.  Her first instinct in refusing to know Maisie had been profoundly right.  It was as if she had foreseen, even then, that knowing Maisie would mean loving her, and that, loving her, she would be beaten and broken down.  The awful thing was that she did love Maisie; and she couldn’t tell which was the worse to bear, her love for Maisie or Maisie’s love for her.  And who could have foreseen the pain of it?  When she prayed that she might take the whole punishment, she had not reckoned on this refinement and precision of torture.  God knew what he was about.  With all his resources he couldn’t have hit on anything more delicately calculated to hurt.  Nothing less subtle would have touched her.  Not discovery; not the grossness of exposure; but this intolerable security.  What could discovery and exposure do but set her free in her reality?  Anne would have rejoiced to see her lie go up in one purifying flame of revelation.  But to go safe in her lie, hiding her reality, and yet defenceless under the sting of Maisie’s loving, was more than she could bear.  She had brought all her truth and all her fineness to this passion which Maisie’s innocence made a sin, and she was punished where she had sinned, wounded by the subtle God in her fineness and her truth.  If only Jerrold could have escaped, but he was vulnerable, too; there was fineness and truth in him.  To suffer really he had to be wounded in his soul.

If Jerrold was hurt then they must end it.

As yet he had given no sign of feeling; but that was like him.  Up to the last minute he would fight against feeling, and when it came he would refuse to own that he suffered, that there was any cause for suffering.  It would be like the time when his father was dying, when he refused to see that he was dying.  So he would refuse to see Maisie and then, all at once, he would see her and he would be beaten and broken down.

vii

And suddenly he did see her.

It was on the first Sunday after Jerrold’s return.  Maisie had had another of her heart attacks, by herself, in her bed, the night before; and she had been lying down all day.  The sun had come round on to the terrace, and she now rested there, wrapped in a fur coat and leaning back on her cushions in the garden chair.

They were sitting out there, all three, Jerrold and Anne talking together, and Maisie listening with her sweet, attentive eyes.  Suddenly she shut her eyes and ceased to listen.  Jerrold and Anne went on talking with hushed voices, and in a little while Maisie was asleep.

Her head, rising out of the brown fur, was tilted back on the cushions, showing her innocent white throat; her white violet eyelids were shut down on her eyes, the dark lashes lying still; her mouth, utterly innocent, was half open; her breath came through it unevenly, in light jerks.