And I was glad
for her, and for us. Because you can say what you like, you can't do
anything with the people who have made mistakes and know it, and are
always on the defensive about them. When I saw she didn't feel like
that, that was enough for me. And," she fairly impaled John Williamson
now with her eye, "and you know it."
It was an able summary of her public attitude since the encounter on
Fifth Avenue, and her look at her husband relegated any private
observations of hers at variance with it into the limbo, not of things
forgotten, but of things undone, unsaid, dissolved by the sheer force of
their unfitness to exist, into the breath that begot them.
"You're quite right about it," said Jimmy. "We men are sentimentalists,
as long as things don't come home. But when they do, we're as
uncomfortable about penitents as anybody, and we give them as wide a
berth."
"You're my friend, Jimmy," she said. "There's dinner! But you won't be
allowed to eat. You'll have to begin at the beginning and tell us all
about her! Though I don't see," she went on, "how you can know very
much more than you put in the paper, if you didn't even find out where
she lived.
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