Florence recalled how he had met her at the stair-foot with the letter in his hand and some greater trouble in his face. Then that angry insistence of his in the glass room had been simply reparation! He had known then that he loved the girl, and somehow known too late. And he had told Julia _that_! She saw with dreadful clearness. Did everything go back to the night when she had wanted and taken so ruthlessly what she desired? It was not Julia, but she, herself, who had led that leap in which he had fallen.
In her own room she lay a long time, accustoming herself to the new face of the situation, struggling back from extremes of self-hate and self-love to a clearer vision. She must touch again what she had so hoped she had finished with. Something she had called fate had seemed to be thrusting him from that girl; but fate, as she looked, grew to wear too much her own aspect. Had she let conditions alone in the beginning—but she had fought them, curbed them in a measure to her will. She had made a catastrophe, and she must mend it. That was the reason of it. But under reason was a passionate desire that he should be happy. That covered everything.
His self-accusation recurred to her. “Something no woman could forgive.” Could not that girl forgive him that he was loyal? But she was so young, so appallingly young! And oh, the dangerous, difficult task of playing another’s game for him! Yet, could he have played it himself, had he had his strength, he would have made it a different matter. Now, all he could manage in his great bodily weakness was that one absorbing desire to get away. She knew how impossible it was to deflect him where once his obstinate mind was made up. She felt every moment, with his returning strength, her chance was slipping further from her. But she was baffled. Turn and twist as she could, she was shut fast in the middle of a deadlock.
The departure of all the amalgamating presences had left the estrangement of these few so closely concerned a naked fact. They felt its presence palpable among them. It filled the rooms of the house, sat between them at table, walked with them in the gardens. Julia, unreachable behind her hard indifference, through which her voice broke sometimes with sharp suggestions of collapse; Mrs. Budd, nervous, vacillating, strung to the verge of tears; she, herself, out of love with everything but the hope of one man’s life; all were desperately at odds, no one trusting another.