That was just exactly what I doubted.

I was wrong. She always had seen. And it was because she saw and loathed herself for seeing that [Pg 202] she insisted on Burton\'s doing this thing. It was part of her expiation, her devotion, her long sacrificial act. She was dragging Burton into it partly, I believe, because he had seen too, more clearly, more profanely, more terribly than she.

Oh, and there was more in it than that. I got it all from Burton. He had been immensely plucky about it. He didn\'t leave it to me to get him out of it. He had gone to her himself, so certain was he that he could make it straight with her.

And he hadn\'t made it straight at all. It had been more awful, he said, than I could imagine. She hadn\'t seen his point. She had refused to see it, absolutely (I had been right there, anyhow).

He had said, in order to be decent, that he was too busy; he was pledged to Lankester and couldn\'t possibly do the two together. And she had seen all that. She said of course it was a pity that he couldn\'t do it now, while people were ready for her father, willing, she said, to listen; but if it couldn\'t be done at once, why, it couldn\'t. After all, they could afford to wait. He, she said superbly, could afford it. She ignored in her fine manner the material side of the "Life and Letters," its absolute importance to their poor finances, the fact that if he could afford to wait, they couldn\'t. I don\'t think that view of it ever entered into her head. The great thing, she said, was that it should be done.

And then he had to tell her that he couldn\'t do it. He couldn\'t do it at all. "That part of it, Simpson," he said, "was horrible. I felt as if I were butchering her—butchering a lamb."

But I gathered that he had been pretty firm so far, until she broke down and cried. For she did, poor bleeding lamb, all in a minute. She abandoned her superb attitude and her high ground and put it altogether [Pg 203] on another footing. Her father hadn\'t been the happy, satisfied, facilely successful person he was supposed to be. People had been cruel to him; they had never understood; they didn\'t realize that his work didn\'t represent him. Of course she knew (she seems to have handled this part of it with a bold sincerity) what he, Burton, thought about it; but he did realize that. He knew it didn\'t do him anything like justice. He knew what lay behind it, behind everything that he had written. It was wonderful, Burton said, how she did that, how she made the vague phrase open up a vast hinterland of intention, the unexplored and unexploited spirit of him. He knew, Burton knew, how he had felt about it, how he had felt about his fame. It hadn\'t been the thing he really wanted. He had never had that. And oh, she wanted him to have it. It was the only thing she wanted, the only thing she really cared about, the only thing she had ever asked of Burton.

He told me frankly that she didn\'t seem quite sane about it. He understood it, of course. She was broken up by the long strain of her devotion, by his death and by the crash afterwa............