She
tried to picture him, straight, trim, beautifully brushed
and varnished, walking furtively down a quiet street, and
looking about him before he slipped into a doorway. She
understood now that she had been cold to him: what more
likely than that he had sought compensations? All men were
like that, she supposed--no doubt her simplicity had amused
him.
In the act of transposing Fraser Leath into a Don Juan she
was pulled up by the ironic perception that she was simply
trying to justify Darrow. She wanted to think that all men
were "like that" because Darrow was "like that": she wanted
to justify her acceptance of the fact by persuading herself
that only through such concessions could women like herself
hope to keep what they could not give up. And suddenly she
was filled with anger at her blindness, and then at her
disastrous attempt to see. Why had she forced the truth out
of Darrow? If only she had held her tongue nothing need ever
have been known. Sophy Viner would have broken her
engagement, Owen would have been sent around the world, and
her own dream would have been unshattered. But she had
probed, insisted, cross-examined, not rested till she had
dragged the secret to the light. She was one of the luckless
women who always have the wrong audacities, and who always
know it...
Was it she, Anna Leath, who was picturing herself to herself
in that way? She recoiled from her thoughts as if with a
sense of demoniac possession, and there flashed through her
the longing to return to her old state of fearless
ignorance.
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