ot to hear me. His eyes were fixed on Mary. He seemed to
think he had dismissed me, and that I was no longer there. His mind was
not concerned about me, but about her. He spoke as though what he said
had been in his mind, and no doubt it had been in his mind, for many
days. "I didn't deserve this," he said to her. "I've tried to make your
life as you wanted your life. It's astonishing to find--I haven't. You
gave no sign. I suppose I ought to have felt all this happening, but it
comes upon me surprisingly. I don't know what I'm to do." He became
aware of me again. "And _you_!" he said. "What am I to do? To think that
you--while I have been treating her like some sacred thing...."

The color was creeping back into his face. Indignation had come into
his voice, the first yellow lights of rising jealousy showed in his
eyes.

"Stephen," I heard Mary say, "will you leave me to talk to my husband?"

"There is only one thing to do," I said. "What is the need of talking?
We two are lovers, Justin." I spoke to both of them. "We two must go out
into the world, go out now together. This marriage of yours--it's no
marriage, no real marriage...."

I think I said that. I seem to remember saying that; perhaps with other
phrases that I have forgotten. But my memory of what we said and did,
which is so photographically clear of these earlier passages that I
believe I can answer for every gesture and nearly every word that I have
set down, becomes suddenly turbid. The high tension of our first
confrontation was giving place to a flood of emotional impulse. We all
became eager to talk, to impose interpretations and justifications upon
our situation. We all three became divided between our partial attention
to one another and our urgent necessity to keep hold of our points of
view. That I think is the common tragedy of almost all human conflicts,
that rapid breakdown from the first cool apprehension of an issue to
heat, confusion, and insistence. I do not know if indeed we raised our
voices, but my memory has an effect of raised voices, and when at last I
went out of the house it seemed to me that the men-servants in the hall
were as hushed as beasts before a thunderstorm, and all of them quite
fully aware of the tremendous catastrophe that had come to Martens. And
moreover, as I recalled afterwards with astonishment, I went past them
and out into the driving rain unprotected, and not one of them stirred
a serviceable hand....

What w