She did not want to confess what she was doing because
she was afraid that her spiritual advisers would blame her for
deceiving me. I rather imagine that she would have preferred
damnation to breaking my heart. That is what it works out at. She
need not have troubled.
But, having no priests to talk to, she had to talk to someone, and as
Florence insisted on talking to her, she talked back, in short,
explosive sentences, like one of the damned. Precisely like one of
the damned. Well, if a pretty period in hell on this earth can spare
her any period of pain in Eternity--where there are not any
periods--I guess Leonora will escape hell fire.
Her conversations with Florence would be like this. Florence
would happen in on her, whilst she was doing her wonderful hair,
with a proposition from Edward, who seems about that time to
have conceived the na?ve idea that he might become a
polygamist. I daresay it was Florence who put it into his head.
Anyhow, I am not responsible for the oddities of the human
psychology. But it certainly appears that at about that date Edward
cared more for Leonora than he had ever done before--or, at any
rate, for a long time. And, if Leonora had been a person to play
cards and if she had played her cards well, and if she had had no
sense of shame and so on, she might then have shared Edward
with Florence until the time came for jerking that poor cuckoo out
of the nest.
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