"You know I told you--when we had that talk in London--that I wanted to
write. I thought it would be good for me--would take my thoughts
off--well, what had happened. And I began to write this--and it amused
me to find I could do it--and I suppose I got carried away. I loved
describing you, and glorifying you--and I loved making caricatures of
Lady Parham--and all the people I hated. I used to work at it whenever
you were away--or I was dull and there was nothing to do.
"Did it never occur to you," said Ashe, interrupting, "that it might get
you--get us both--into trouble, and that you ought to tell me?"
She wavered.
"No!" she said, at last. "I never did mean to tell you, while I was
writing it. You know I don't tell lies, William! The real fact is, I was
afraid you'd stop it."
"Good God!" He threw up his hands with a sound of amazement, then thrust
them again into his pockets and began to pace up and down.
"But then"--she resumed--"I thought you'd soon get over it, and that it
was funny--and everybody would laugh--and you'd laugh--and there would
be an end of it."
He turned and stared at her. "Frankly, Kitty--I don't understand what
you can be made of! You imagined that that sketch of Lord Parham"--he
struck the open page--"a sketch written by
my wife, describing my
official chief--when he was my guest--under my own roof--with all sorts
of details of the most intimate and offensive kind--mocking his
speech--his manners--his little personal ways--charging him with being
the corrupt tool of Lady Parham, disloyal to his colleagues, a man not
to be trusted--and justifying all this by a sort of evidence that you
could only have got as my wife and Lord Parham's hostess--you actually
supposed that you could write and publish
that!--without in the first
place its being plain to every Tom, Dick, and Harry that you had written
it--and in the next, without making it impossible for your husband to
remain a colleague of the man you had treated in such a way? Kitty!--you
are not a stupid woman! Do you really mean to say that you could write
and publish this book without
knowing that you were doing a wrong
action--which, so far from serving me, could only damage my career
irreparably? Did nothing--did no one warn you--if you were determined to
keep such a secret from your husband, whom it most concerned?"
He had come to stand beside her, both hands on the back of a
chair--stooping forward to emphasize his words--the lines of his fine
face and noble brow contracted by anger and pain.
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