And now Eliot was nearer to him than anything in the world, except Anne.

“I’m sorry, Jerrold.”

“You’re pretty decent, Eliot, to be sorry—­I believe you honestly want me to have Anne.”

“I wouldn’t go so far as that, old man.  But I believe I honestly want Anne to have you....  I say, she hasn’t gone yet, has she?”

“No.  Maisie’s keeping her for dinner in your honour.  You’ll probably find her in the drawing-room now.”

“Where’s Maisie?”

“She won’t worry you.  She’s gone to lie down.”

Eliot went into the drawing-room and found Anne there.

She looked at him.  “You’ve been talking to Jerrold,” she said.

“Yes, Anne.  I’m worried about him.”

“So am I.”

“And I’m worried about you.”

“And he’s worried about Maisie.”

“Yes.  I suppose he began by not seeing she was ill, and now he does see it he thinks she’s going to die.  I’ve been trying to explain to him that she isn’t.”

“Can you explain why she’s got into this state?  It’s not as if she wasn’t happy.  She is happy.”

“She wasn’t always happy.  Jerrold must have made her suffer damnably.”

“When?”

“Oh, long before he married her.”

“But how did he make her suffer?”

“Oh, by just not marrying her.  She found out he didn’t care for her.  Her people took her out to India, I believe, with the idea that he would marry her.  And when they saw that Jerry wasn’t on in that act they sent her back again.  Poor Maisie got it well rammed into her then that he didn’t care for her, and the idea’s stuck.  It’s left a sort of wound in her memory.”

“But she must have thought he cared for her when he did marry her.  She thinks he cares now.”

“Of course she thinks it.  I don’t suppose he’s ever let her see.”

“I know he hasn’t.”

“But the wound’s there, all the same.  She’s never got over it, though she isn’t conscious of it now.  The fact remains that Maisie’s marriage is incomplete because Jerry doesn’t care for her.  Part of Maisie, the adorable part we know, isn’t aware of any incompleteness; it lives in a perpetual illusion.  But the part we don’t know, the hidden, secret part of her, is aware of nothing else....  Well, her illness is simply camouflage for that.  Maisie’s mind couldn’t bear the reality, so it escaped into a neurosis.  Maisie’s behaving as though she wasn’t married, so that her mind can say to itself that her marriage is incomplete because she’s ill, not because Jerry doesn’t care for her.  It’s substituted a bearable situation for an unbearable one.”

“Then, you don’t think she knows?”

“That Jerrold doesn’t care for her?  No.  Only in that unconscious way.  Her mind remembers and she doesn’t.”

“I mean, she doesn’t know about Jerrold and me?”

“I’m sure she doesn’t.  If she did she’d do something.”