That's what it
leads to."

"Ah, but with some of them, you'd never get there; they're not made for
wives--or sisters--or mothers. And no man, if he saw what he was going
into, would dance their dance. He wouldn't choose it, that is, when he
thinks back to it."

Alston took out his match-box, and felt his fingers quiver on it. He
was enraged with himself for minding. This was the warning then. He was
told, almost in exact words, not to covet his neighbour's wife,
cautioned like a boy not to snatch at forbidden fruit, and even,
unthinkably, that the fruit was, besides not being his, rotten. And at
his heart he knew the warning was fair and true. Esther had dealt a blow
to his fastidious idealities. Her deceit had slain something. She had
not so much betrayed it to him by facts, for facts he could, if passion
were strong enough, put aside. But his inner heart searching for her
heart, like a hand seeking a beloved hand, had found an emptiness. He
was so bruised now that he wanted to hit out and hurt Jeff, perhaps, at
least force him to naked warfare.

"You want me to believe," he said, "that--Esther--" he stumbled over the
word, but at such a pass he would not speak of her more
decorously--"years ago took Madame Beattie's necklace."

Jeff was watching the boys across the flats, critically and with a real
interest.

"She did," he said.

Alston bolstered himself with a fictitious anger.

"And you can tell me of it," he blustered.

"You asked me."

"You believe she did?"

"It's true," said Jeff, with the utmost quietness. "I never have said it
before. Not to my father even. But he knows. He did naturally, in the
flurry of that time."

"Yet you tell me because I ask you."

Alston seemed to be bitterly defending Esther.

"Not precisely," said Jeff. "Because you're bewitched by her. You must
get over that."

The distance wavered before Choate's eyes, He hated Jeffrey childishly
because he could be so calm.

"You needn't worry," he said. "She is as completely separated from me as
if--as if you had never been away from her."

"That's it," said Jeff. "You can't marry her unless she's divorced from
me. She's welcome to that--the divorce, I mean. But you can't go
drivelling on having frenzies over her. Good God, Choate, don't you see
what you're doing? You're wasting yourself. Shake it off. You don't want
Esther. She's shocked you out of your boots already. And she doesn't
know there's anything to be shocked at.