“Orestes has been here often, I suppose,” said Hermione, “but it doesn’t seem often. Perhaps that’s because I’m in love with him, as he is with me. I should have told you before, but I thought you didn’t care for him.”
“I don’t care for him,” said Helen, “but then I don’t intend to marry him. Do you? You see the dilemma you’ve placed yourself in. If you wished to marry him, yet gave him up because I disapproved, I’d know you valued my opinion—and I’d know you weren’t altogether in love. But if you are to marry him anyway, and defer to my opinion only by concealing your intentions, then I’m not flattered, and I foresee no happiness in your marriage. In marriage, if anywhere, you need the courage of your convictions, at least at the beginning.”
“You hurt me so,” cried Hermione, “I’m tempted to speak plainly enough to satisfy even you! I don’t know whether it’s the courage of my convictions, or just that I’m angry, but I don’t admire your kind of courage, nor the kind of man you ran away with, nor your ideas about scandal! I still have some impulse—I don’t know why I have it—to spare you the things you don’t like but which can’t be helped. I’m not so old as you, but I don’t feel very young. I’ve grown up watching what you call your unusual career, and I realise without the slightest shame that I’m more old-fashioned than you are; I like the respectability you seem to dread, I want a lover I can settle down with and be true to, I’m going to have an orderly home. I’m sorry I tried to save your reputation for you, since you prefer it the other way, but no great harm was done—none of your friends really believed me. What I did was out of duty, I have no reason to love you, I owe you gratitude for nothing. You never made me happy, you never made anyone happy, not even those who loved you—not my father nor Paris, nor any of them. Paris must have seen—he was a fool to take you.”
Hermione was a bit amazed, and on the whole gratified, at her own indignation and spirit. She felt it was a big moment. Helen, too, strange to say, seemed pleased.
“Now you are telling the truth,” she said. “Thank heaven you are beginning, though it’s at the bottom, where we so often begin—with unpleasant things about others. But I’d rather hear this than those silly fabrications of yours. Correct at every point; you have no reason to love me, and none to be grateful. As for Paris, I’ve often wondered why he loved me. For the same reason, I suspect, that your father didn’t kill me, that night in Troy. I told Paris precisely what you have said—that I had made no one happy. I also told him that no man had made me happy—that what promised to be immortal ecstasy would prove but a moment, brief and elusive, that our passion would bring misery after it, that for him it would probably bring death. With his eyes open, and I can’t say he was a fool, he chose our love. Or perhaps there was no choice. But surely your father knew the worst when he came to find me, sword in hand and murder in his heart. He had every right to kill me, and I thought he would. Or perhaps I didn’t think so.”