"
"I don't know," she said raggedly. "Perhaps ..." A sob clutched at her
throat and she did not try to conclude the sentence.
"As to whether you did right or wrong in leaving him," he went on,
"you've got to figure it this way. It isn't fair to say, 'Knowing what I
know now and being what I am now, but in the situation I was in then,
I'd have done differently.' The thing you've got to take into account
is, being what you were then, suppose you hadn't gone? You thought then
that you were just his mistress, not knowing what a real mistress was
like; and you thought that by going away you could make yourself his
friend. You thought that was your great chance. Well, you couldn't have
stayed without feeling that you had thrown away your chance; without
knowing that you'd had your big thing to do and had been afraid to do
it. And that knowledge would have gone a long way toward making you the
thing you thought you were.
"Well, you did your big thing. And a person who's done that has stayed
alive anyway; and he knows that when his next big thing comes along
he'll do that too.
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