We might be ruined! Well, there is a phase in every love affair, a sort of heroic hysteria, when death and ruin are agreeable additions to the prospect. It gives the business a gravity, a solemnity. Timid people may hesitate and draw back with a vague instinctive terror of the immensity of the oppositions they challenge, but neither Isabel nor I are timid people.
We weighed what was against us. We decided just exactly as scores of thousands of people have decided in this very matter, that if it were possible to keep this thing to ourselves, there was nothing against it. And so we took our first step. With the hunger of love in us, it was easy to conclude we might be lovers, and still keep everything to ourselves. That cleared our minds of the one persistent obstacle that mattered to us—the haunting presence of Margaret.
And then we found, as all those scores of thousands of people scattered about us have found, that we could not keep it to ourselves.
Love will out.
All the rest of this story is the chronicle of that.
Love with sustained secrecy cannot be love.
It is just exactly the point people do not understand.
5
But before things came to that pass, some months and many phases and a sudden journey to America intervened.
“This thing spells disaster,” I said. “You are too big and I am too big to attempt this secrecy. Think of the intolerable possibility of being found out! At any cost we have to stop—even at the cost of parting.”
“Just because we may be found out!”