“You know perfectly well why I’m staying in your house; and if you don’t, Norah does.  I could have stayed with my father, for that matter.”

I said I thought that that was extremely doubtful—­in the circumstances.

I had her there, and she knew it, for she retired in bad order on an irrelevant point.  She said I was no judge of the circumstances.

I said peaceably that perhaps I wasn’t, but that she must own that I had behaved as if I were.  At any rate I’d given her the benefit of the doubt.

She said, “You talk as if I’d been through the Divorce Court.  Perhaps that’s where you think I ought to be.  The benefit of the doubt!  You certainly have given it me.  It’s been nothing but doubt with you, Walter, ever since I knew you.  You always thought awful things about me.  I know you have.  I could see you thinking them.  You thought vile things about me, and vile things about Jimmy.  You came rushing out to Belgium because you thought them.  And the other day you thought the same thing of me and Charlie Thesiger, and you came rushing after me again and giving me away, and behaving so that everybody else would think me awful too.”

“My dear child, you owned yourself that Charlie—­”

“Oh—­Charlie!  As if he mattered!  He was only being an ass—­the war upset him, or something.  I don’t care what you think about Charlie—­he doesn’t either—­but why you should go out of your way to think me awful—­”

I said I thought we’d done with that.

“No,” she said, “we haven’t done with it.  I want to get to the bottom of it.  What makes you do these things?  I believe you want to make out that I’m horrid, just as you wanted to make out that poor little Jimmy was, when I went to him in Bruges.”

She went on.  “I can understand that, because I did go to him, and I—­I cared for him and you didn’t like it.  I can even understand your wanting me to be horrid then, because it made it easier for you.  I had the sense to see that that was all that was the matter with you then, so I didn’t mind.  But why on earth you should keep it up like this!  What can it matter to you now whether I’m nice or horrid?”

She had rushed on, carried away by her own passion, without seeing where she was going.  I don’t think she had seen, any more than I had, that for nine years I had been living behind a screen.  A screen that had hidden me from myself.  I don’t think she saw even now when she came crashing into it.

It was I who saw.

The thing was down about my ears; and it wasn’t the violence of its fall that terrified me; it was my own nakedness.  I wasn’t prepared to find myself morally undressed.

I turned away from her.  I began fiddling with my pens and papers.  I trailed long slip-proofs under her eyes, pretending that I had work to do.  But she saw through my pretences and her voice followed me.