very faintly, like an echo, "He has been false to himself." For just a
moment she loved him enough to think that he had sinned. _Maurice has
sinned!_ When she said that, the dismay of it made her forget herself.
She said it with horror, and after a while she added a question: "_Why_
did he do it?" Then came beating its way up through anger and wounded
pride, and suffering love, still another question: "Was it my fault that
he did it? Did he fall in love with that frightful woman because I
failed him?" Instantly her mind sheered off from this question: "I did
everything I knew how to make him happy! I would have died to make him
happy. I adored him! How could he care for that common, ignorant woman I
saw on the porch? A woman who wasn't a lady. A--a _bad_ woman!" But yet
the question repeated itself: "Why? Why?" It demanded an answer: Why did
Maurice--high-minded, pure-hearted, overflowing with a love as
beautiful, and as perfect as Youth itself--how _could_ Maurice be drawn
to such a woman? And by and by the answer struggled to her lips, tearing
her heart as it came with dreadful pain: "He did it because I didn't
make him happy."

Just as Maurice, recognizing the responsibility of creation, had, at the
touch of his son's little hand, felt the tremor of a moral conception,
so now Eleanor, barren so long! felt the pangs of a birth of spiritual
responsibility: "I didn't make him happy, so--Oh, my poor Maurice, it
was my fault!"... But of course this divine self-forgetfulness in
self-reproach, was as feeble as any new-born thing. When it stirred, and
uttered little elemental sounds--"my fault, my fault"--she forgot the
wrong he had done her, in seeing the wrong he had done himself.... "Oh,
my Maurice--my Maurice!" But most of the time she did not hear this
frail cry of the sense of sin! She thought entirely and angrily of
herself; she said, over and over, that she was going to leave him. She
was absorbed in hideous and poignant imaginings, based on that organic
curiosity which is experienced only by the woman who meditates upon "the
other woman." When these visions overwhelmed her, she said she wouldn't
leave him--she would hold him! She wouldn't give him up to that
frightful creature, whom he--kissed.... "Oh, my God! He _kisses_ her!"
No; she wouldn't give him up; she would just accuse him; just tell him
she knew he had been false; tell him there was no use lying about it!
Then, perhaps, say she would forgive him?... Yes;