Page:HG Wells--secret places of the heart.djvu/223

211 “No. It is no good your inventing excuses for a man you know nothing about. It was vile, contemptible cowardice—and meanness. It fitted in with a score of ugly little things I remembered. It explained them all. I know the evidence and the judgment against him were strictly just and true, because they were exactly in character.... And that, you see, was my man. That was the lover I had chosen. That was the man to whom I had given myself with both hands.”

Her soft unhurrying voice halted for a time, and then resumed in the same even tones of careful statement. “I wasn’t disgusted, not even with myself. About him I was chiefly sorry, intensely sorry, because I had made him come out of a life that suited and protected him, to the war. About myself, I was stunned and perplexed. I had the clearest realization that what you and I have been calling the bright little personal life had broken off short and was spoilt and over and done with. I felt as though it was my body they had shot. And there I was, with fifty years of life left in me and nothing particular to do with them.”

“That was just the prelude to life, said Sir Richmond.

“It didn’t seem so at the time. I felt I had to got hold of something or go to pieces. I couldn’t turn to religion. I had no religion. And Duty? What is Duty? I set myself to that. I had a kind