"Nothing happened," said Peter. "I warned you that it was a
drama without action. A good deal happened, no doubt, in
Wildmay's secret soul. But externally, nothing. They simply
chatted together--exchanged the time o' day--like any pair of
acquaintances. No, I don't think she had read his book. She
did read it afterwards, though."
"And liked it?"
"Yes--she said she liked it."
"Well--? But then-?" the Duchessa pressed him, insistently.
"When she discovered the part she had had in its composition--?
Was n't she overwhelmed? Wasn't she immensely interested
--surprised--moved?"
She leaned forward a little. Her eyes were shining. Her lips
were slightly parted, so that between their warm rosiness Peter
could see the exquisite white line of her teeth. His heart
fluttered again. "I must be cautious, cautious," he
remembered, and made a strenuous "act of will" to steady
himself.
"Oh, she never discovered that," he said.
"What!" exclaimed the Duchessa. Her face fell. Her eyes
darkened--with dismay, with incomprehension. "Do you--you
don't--mean to say that he didn't tell her?" There was
reluctance to believe, there was a conditional implication of
deep reproach, in her voice.
Peter had to repeat his act of will.
"How could he tell her?" he asked.
She frowned at him, with reproach that was explicit now, and a
kind of pained astonishment.
"How could he help telling her?" she cried. "But--but it was
the one great fact between them. But it was a fact that
intimately concerned her--it was a fact of her own destiny.
But it was her right to be told. Do you seriously mean that he
did n't tell her? But why did n't he? What could have
possessed him?"
There was something like a tremor in her voice. "I must appear
entirely nonchalant and candid," Peter remembered.
"I fancy he was possessed, in some measure, by a sense of the
liberty he had taken by a sense of what one might, perhaps,
venture to qualify as his 'cheek.' For, if it was n't already
a liberty to embody his notion of her in a novel--in a
published book, for daws to peck at--it would have become a
liberty the moment he informed her that he had done so. That
would have had the effect of making her a kind of involuntary
particeps criminis."
"Oh, the foolish man!" sighed the Duchessa, with a rueful shake
of the head. "His foolish British self-consciousness! His
British inability to put himself in another person's place, to
see things from another's point of view! Could n't he see,
from her point of view, from any point of view but his own,
that it was her right to be told? That the matter affected her
in one way, as much as it affected him in another? That since
she had influenced--since she had contributed to--his life and
his art as she had, it was her right to know it? Couldn't he
see that his 'cheek,' his real 'cheek,' began when he withheld
from her that great strange chapter of her own history? Oh, he
ought to have told her, he ought to have told her."