I have said already, I think, that the instinctive motive of Vera’s life was her independent pride.  Cling to that, and however the world might rock and toss around her she could not be wrecked.  Imagine, then, what she must have suffered during the weeks that followed her surrender to Lawrence.  Not that for a moment she intended to go back on her surrender, which was, indeed, the proudest moment of her whole life.  She never looked back for one second after that embrace, she never doubted herself or him or the supreme importance of love itself; but the rest of her—­her tenderness, her fidelity, her loyalty, her self-respect—­this was all tortured now by the things that she seemed compelled to do.  It must have appeared to her as though Fate, having watched that complete abandonment, intended to deprive her of everything upon which she had depended.  She was, I think, a woman of very simple instincts.  The things that had been in her life—­her love for Nina, her maternal tenderness for Nicholas, her sense of duty—­remained with her as strongly after that tremendous Thursday afternoon as they had been before it.  She did not see why they need be changed.  She did not love Nina any the less because she loved Lawrence; indeed, she had never loved Nina so intensely as on the night when she had realised her love for Lawrence to the full, that night when they had sheltered the policeman.  And she had never pretended to love Nicholas.  She had always told him that she did not love him.  She had been absolutely honest with him always, and he had often said to her, “If ever real love comes into your life, Vera, you will leave me,” and she had always answered him, “No, Nicholas, why should I?  I will never change.  Why should I?”

She honestly thought that her love for Lawrence need not alter things.  She would tell Nicholas, of course, and then she would act as he wished.  If she were not to see Lawrence she would not see him—­that would make no difference to her love for him.  What she did not realise—­and that was strange after living with him for so long—­was that he was always hoping that her tender kindliness towards him would, one day, change into something more passionate.  I think that, subconsciously, she did realise it, and that was why she was, during those weeks before the Revolution, so often uneasy and unhappy.  But I am sure that definitely she never admitted it.

The great fact was that, as soon as possible, she must tell Nicholas all about it.  And the days went by, and she did not.  She did not, partly because she had now some one else as well as herself to consider.  I believe that in those weeks between that Thursday and Easter Day she never had one moment alone with Lawrence.  He came, as Bohun had told me, to see them; he sat there and looked at her, and listened and waited.  She herself, I expect, prevented their being alone.  She was waiting for something to happen.  Then Nina’s flight overwhelmed everything.  That must have been the most awful