“Oh, God!” I said.
If I warned him now—there would still be time—and the man had been at school with me—and we had lived in the same rooms—and he was a great painter—something would be lost to the world if they hanged Lathom.
Elizabeth did nothing. She stood with the receiver in her hand.
“Tell him—”
“Yes?”
“Tell him I am out.”
She turned back to the instrument.
“I am so sorry, my husband is out. Can I give any message? No, very well. You’ll ring up again. Good night.”
She came over and stood by me.
“Elizabeth, tell me, am I an unutterable sweep?”
“No. There was nothing else you could do.”
I want to know whether Lathom knows the sort of woman he did it for. I want to know how much she really knows or suspects. I want to know whether, when she wrote that letter which drove him to do it, she was deceiving him or herself. I want to know whether, in all these months, he has been thinking that she was worth it, or whether, in a ghastly disillusionment, he has realised that the only real part of her was vulgar and bad, and the rest merely the brilliant refraction of himself. What is the good? Whatever he realised, he must have gone on telling himself she was worth it, or he would have gone mad.