“So it does me, when I think about it.”

“It’s knowing her, Jerry.  It’s having to love her, and knowing that she loves me; it’s knowing what she is....  Why did you make me see her?”

“You know why.”

“Yes.  Because it made it safer.  That’s the beastliness of it.  I knew how it would be.  I knew she’d beat us in the end—­with her goodness.”

“Darling, it isn’t your fault.”

“It is.  It’s all my fault.  I’m not going back on it.  I’d do it again to-morrow if it weren’t for Maisie.  Even now I don’t know whether it’s right or wrong.  I only know it’s the most real and valuable part of me that loves you, and it’s the most real and valuable part of you that loves me; and I feel somehow that that makes it right.  I’d go on with it if it made you happy.  But you aren’t happy now.”

“I’m not happy because you’re not.  I don’t mind for myself so much.  Only I hate the beastly way we’ve got to do it.  Covering it all up and pretending that we’re not lovers.  Deceiving her.  That’s what makes it all wrong.  Hiding it.”

“I know.  And I made you do that.”

“You didn’t.  We did it for Maisie.  Anyhow, we must stop it.  We can’t go on like this any more.  We must simply tell her.”

“Tell her?”

“Yes; tell her, and get her to divorce me, so that I can marry you.  It’s the only straight thing.”

“How can we?  It would hurt her so awfully.”

“Not so much as you think.  Remember, she doesn’t care for me.  She’s not like you, Anne.  She’s frightfully cold.”

As he said it there came to her a sudden awful intimation of reality, a sense that behind all their words, all the piled-up protection of their outward thinking, there hid an unknown certainty, a certainty that would wreck them if they knew it.  It was safer not to know, to go on hiding behind those piled-up barriers of thought.  But an inward, ultimate honesty drove her to her questioning.

“Are you sure she’s cold?”

“Absolutely sure.  You go on thinking all the time that she’s like you, that she takes things as hard as you do; but she doesn’t.  She doesn’t feel as you do.  It won’t hurt her as it would hurt you if I left you for somebody else.”

“But—­it’ll hurt her.”

“It’s better to hurt her a little now than to go on humbugging and shamming till she finds out.  That would hurt her damnably.  She’d hate our not being straight with her.  But if we tell her the truth she’ll understand.  I’m certain she’ll understand and she’ll forgive you.  She can’t be hard on you for caring for me.”

“Even if she doesn’t care?”

“She cares for you,” he said.

She couldn’t push it from her, that importunate sense of a certainty that was not his certainty.  If Maisie did care for him Jerrold wouldn’t see it.  He never saw what he didn’t want to see.

“Supposing she does care all the time?  How do you know she doesn’t?”