And if I hadn't it would all have been
different."
"No, it would all have been the same."
Artois started. Out of the darkness a voice, a low, cold, inexorable
voice had spoken--had spoken absolute truth, correcting his lie:
"It would all have been the same!"
The woman's unerring instinct had penetrated much further than the
man's. He had been feeling the shell; she plucked out the kernel. He
had been speaking of the outward facts, of the actions of the body;
she spoke of the inward facts, of the actions of the soul. Her
husband's sin against her was not his unfaithfulness, the
unfaithfulness at the Fair, but the fact that all the time he had been
with her, all the time she had been giving her whole self to him, all
the time that she had been surrounding him with her love, he had
retained in his soul the power to will to commit it. That he had been
given an opportunity to sin was immaterial. What was material was that
he had been capable of sinning.
Artois saw his lie.
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