it was best to let it all come to an end.  It wasn’t easy, for though I had got so that it was torture to be with him, because all the time I was feeling our dead selves between us, yet directly I was away I knew that, even though he was the man he was and I the me I had become, we were still nearer to what had been than anything else could be.  But I did it.  It was only when he was dying I went to Paris to him.”

“And that...?”

“Oh, it was quite a success.  I don’t mean to be brutal, but it was.  He was glad to have me, and showed it....  A deathbed is so terribly egoistic; it can’t be helped, but he forgot himself more than ever before.  I was touched profoundly, but all the time I saw that he was rising to the occasion without knowing it himself.  Not that he was emotional; he was never that.  But he showed me something deeper than he ever had before.  With all his passion he was always so English, always so much the critic, in spite of his powers of enjoyment.  He had always made love in caresses, never in words.  Till this last time, as he was dying.”

Judy was speaking in a quiet voice that sounded as though all her tears had been shed, yet they were pouring down her face, making havoc of the paint and powder, of which she was quite aware and for which she cared not at all.  Ishmael thought she had never shown her triumphant naturalness, her stark candour, more finely.  As on that evening when he had met her in Paradise Lane, he was conscious that they understood each other almost as well as anyone ever can understand any other human being, because they were in some respects so alike.  Something quiet and incurably reserved in him—­he could never have talked as bravely as she did—­yet was the same as the quality in her that enabled her to bear her secret relations with Killigrew, that had enabled her to break those relations off when she thought it best.  And now she seemed to have won through to some calm, he wondered what it was and how she had come to it....

“What you said about marriage,” he said at last, “struck me rather.  It’s true.  One loses something, but one finds something.”

“Marriage, even the most idealistic of marriages, must blunt the edges to a certain extent,” said Judy.  “You may call it growing into a saner, more wholesome, view of life, or you may call it a blunting of the edges—­the fact is the same.  Marriage is a terribly clumsy institution, but it’s the most possible way this old world has evolved.  It always comes back to it after brave but fated sallies into other paths.”

“Such as yours?” asked Ishmael.  It was impossible to pretend to fence with honesty such as hers.

“No, not such as mine, because I cannot say I did it for any exalted reason, such as wishing to reform the world.  I had no splendid ideas on mutual freedom or anything like that.  I did it simply because I loved Joe and it was the only way I could have him without making him tired of me and unhappy.  It had to be secret, not only because the sordidness of wagging tongues would have spoilt it so, but because my life would have been so unbearable in the world.  A woman’s sin is always blamed so heavily.  That’s a commonplace, isn’t it?  Yet a woman’s sin should be the more forgivable.  She sins because it is the man; he sins because it is a woman.”