But he insisted. "On certain subjects women prefer to be lied to."
"Did any woman ever tell you so?" she inquired, dryly.
He shrugged his shoulders, put his cup down, and came over to give her a kiss.
"Which is to say, 'Hold your tongue'?" his Mary inquired.
"Oh, never!" he said, and in spite of his distress he laughed; but he looked at her tenderly. "The Lord was good to me, Mary, when He made you take me."
That talk in the studio marked the moment when Maurice Curtis turned his back on youth. It was the beginning of the retreat of an ardent and gayly candid boy into the adult sophistications of Secrecy. The next day when he and Eleanor returned to Mercer, he sat in the car watching with unseeing eyes the back of her head,--her swaying hat, the softly curling tendrils of dark hair in the nape of her neck--and he saw before him a narrow path, leading--across quaking bogs of evasions!--toward a goal of always menaced safety. Mr. Houghton had indicated the path in that midnight talk, and Maurice's first step upon it would be his promise to relieve Lily of the support of her child--"_on condition that she would never communicate with him again_." After that, Henry Houghton said, "the lawyer will clinch things; and nobody will ever be the wiser!" Because Eleanor was the woman she was, he saw no way of escape for Maurice, except through this bog of secrecy, where any careless step might plunge him into a lie. He had not dared to point out that other path, which his Mary thought so much safer than the sucking shakiness of the swamp--the rough and terrible path of confession, which lies across the firm aridities of Truth, and leads to that orderly freedom of the stars to which Maurice had once aspired! So now the boy was going back to Mercer to plunge into the pitfalls and limitless shades of concealment. He did it with a hard purpose of endurance, without hope, and also without complaint.
"If I can just avoid out-and-out lying," he told himself, "I can take my medicine. But if I have to lie--!"
He knew the full bitterness of his medicine when he went to see Lily...
He went the very next day, after office hours... There had been a temptation to postpone the taking of the medicine, because it had been difficult to escape from Eleanor. The well-ordered household at Green Hill had fired her with an impulse to try housekeeping again, and she wanted to urge the idea upon Maurice: