I don't feel that it is _you_--the real _you_--that wrote me that letter at all, but somebody else--somebody I have never known. Did you ever really love me at all, I wonder, or was it, on your side, merely the passion you now profess to be ashamed of? It wasn't that on _my_ side; I really loved you, more than I could love anybody else in the world; I loved even your work and your ideals because they were yours.... I _don't_ feel ashamed, and you _do_, and there's an end of it...." X While I was reading over that last letter for the second time, Mizzi came in. She had seen the light through the window, and had wondered who could be staying up so late. We shook hands gravely, and she said that the porter had told her of our return, and that she was not altogether surprised since Buda-Pesth in midsummer was so hot and--and _unheimlich_. _That_--her using a German word instead of puzzling out an English one--showed me that she was perturbed; and when she asked me how Terry was, a sudden impulse made me place a chair for her opposite to mine and tell her everything about him. _Everything_. And also I showed her the letters. Perhaps I was wrong to do that without his permission, but there are times when you risk being wrong. I wanted Mizzi to know everything about Terry because, in the end, I wanted her to marry him. I talked to her especially about the letters; they showed, I said, the tragic difference between Terry and Helen. "She was right when she said it was all or nothing with him.... Apparently she was quite willing to carry on a more or less decorous affair with him whilst still living with her husband. But he _wasn't_." Mizzi nodded and asked me about the 'last night' mentioned in the second of the letters. I described briefly the Karelsky party and the odd way in which Terry and Helen had managed to separate themselves from the rest of the crowd. "I imagine," I said, "that sometime or other during that evening he asked her point-blank to come away with him. No doubt she either refused or else hesitated, and in the end it was arranged that he should decline the Vienna job and stay in London where they could go on meeting each other.... Then afterwards he felt the intolerableness of the situation. He couldn't bear at all what she, apparently, could bear quite easily--the having of things by halves. It wasn't in his nature.... So he cut the knot and came out here." "I can understand ... I can understand him wanting all of her--or else none of her." "So can I. And, in a way, I can understand _her_ side, as well. After all, he had no money, and neither had she.... It would have been sheer madness for them to run away, and it was her nature to think of that, just as it was his nature not to."