She had, Hilary said, a quite unearthly beauty just at that time, and was so still, so terribly unyoung somewhere inside her. “It was my fault,” she had said. She had been looking when he had thrown himself out of the window. He had just lit a cigarette, she said.
“That a girl of that age,” said Hilary, “that a girl whose moral character, you can’t help seeing, was … well, what it was, should be so impelled to tell the truth at her own expense, at the expense of her own ruin, at the expense of a queer brother’s hatred, for that must have hurt her most of all, by a sense of honour that would make even the rigidity of a Guy look small, well—”
“But isn’t that where, Hilary, there comes in that ‘caste’ which you complain of her having always ignored?”
But Hilary wasn’t going back on any of his words. A “hm,” and he was off, saying that it made him think there was something in the stale paradox that you never know the best about a woman until you know the worst. “But, God in Heaven, what a worst!”
She had wanted, Hilary tried to explain—pathetically, you can see, trying to make clear to himself the noble as well as the shady side of Iris—to keep permanent, even to reinforce, the love for Boy of Boy’s friends by the idea that he had died untamed of his ideal. You could see her, Hilary said, meeting Gerald halfway on that. “Boy died,” she had said, “for purity.”
“Hilary! She said that!”
And that, you know, was all that she had said! Boy Fenwick had died “for purity.” That was all.
“It seems,” I couldn’t help thinking aloud, “very sweeping. …”
It was, Hilary said grimly—and very pointed, in a girl not twenty!
“But!” I murmured.
Boy’s friends, Hilary said, could naturally put only one construction on it. Naturally, Hilary said. “For purity!” And Iris’s friends could put no other. What, after all, didn’t “for purity” mean? It could mean, to all the decent people of the world, but one thing. …
Hilary looked at me in inquiry. I had made a noise. But I was so surprised. “You don’t mean,” I tried not to gasp, “that you condemn her on that for Boy Fenwick’s death!”
“One doesn’t,” snapped Hilary, “ ‘condemn’ an Iris March, an Iris Fenwick, an Iris Storm. They stand condemned in themselves. They are outside the law by which we—”
“Hilary, as the Girondins were put by the Jacobins!”
“We’re not perfect,” said Hilary quietly, “but we’re not that. What Iris was at nineteen or so—or before, evidently—she has been ever since.”
“What, as brave!”
“As loose. She made a gesture after Boy’s death, a fine gesture—and then she set about proving how she had that in her to disenchant a Boy to his death. She had … ‘affairs.’ Not, you know, one long affair … but ‘affairs.’ Oh, quite openly. You’ve no doubt heard about some of them. And when four years later young Storm married her, against his people’s wishes, she was no more than—well, what do you call those people? Demimondaines? And since Storm’s death. …”
“But!” I said, and also I said what it was in my mind to say, for are we sticks, are we stones, or are we human? It was Boy Fenwick I was thinking of, not of Iris’s life later, although it seemed to me that Boy Fenwick had had a good deal to do with that, too. I had begun by provoking Hilary. He had, with that appalling talent of his for appearing reasonable, provoked me. He could arouse all that was worst in a man, could Hilary. He had aroused all that was worst in me against that young purity hero. It seemed to me that it was, to say the least, rather hasty of a young man to die “for purity” in connection with a girl of twenty. “Hilary, in two thousand years we have discovered only one caddish way of getting to Heaven, and Boy Fenwick, like many ‘idealists,’ has taken it.”
“You probably don’t realise,” said Hilary, oh nreasonably, “the depths of sudden despair—in decent people.”
“But I thought we were discussing human beings!” And, as regards human beings, one couldn’t help thinking that a girl who had confessed that her lover had died “for purity” was purer than the lover who had not been able to live for it. Boy Fenwick’s death had an air of getting away with rather a good thing. He had destroyed the girl by exalting himself—for purity! How did boys come to have the infernal conceit of setting themselves up as connoisseurs of purity? And he had taken care to leave his corpse in such a position as best to foul the fountains of his young widow’s womanhood. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ought to speak to him about it.
“Words!” said Hilary. “Words, words!”
“Well, we can’t all,” I pleaded, “talk by throwing ourselves out of windows. And I was brought up to believe that it was caddish to sneak on a woman, whether for purity or for humbug.”
“It was Iris,” said Hilary, “who sneaked on herself.”
“Only because, Hilary, she didn’t want the young man to waste such a fine suicide. She didn’t want to do him out of the glory of dying for true-blue
