He tried to
imagine he had not said them, that his memory played him a trick;
tried to suppose he had said something similar perhaps, but much less
forcible. He attempted with almost equal futility to minimise his own
wounds. His endeavour served only to measure the magnitude of his
fall.
He had recovered everything now, he saw it all. He recalled Ethel,
sunlit in the avenue, Ethel, white in the moonlight before they parted
outside the Frobisher house, Ethel as she would come out of Lagune's
house greeting him for their nightly walk, Ethel new wedded, as she
came to him through the folding doors radiant in the splendour his
emotions threw about her. And at last, Ethel angry, dishevelled and
tear-stained in that ill-lit, untidy little room. All to the cadence
of a hurdy-gurdy tune! From that to this! How had it been possible to
get from such an opalescent dawning to such a dismal day? What was it
had gone? He and she were the same two persons who walked so brightly
in his awakened memory; he and she who had lived so bitterly through
the last few weeks of misery!
His mood sank for a space to the quality of groaning. He implicated
her now at most as his partner in their failure--"What a mess we have
made of things!" was his new motif.
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