“Well, then,” said Hermione, “when once a person has occasioned in you this divine vision of yourself, you might keep the happiness if you never saw the person again?”

“That’s a profound insight,” said Helen, “but to be so wise would be inhuman.”

“One other question, mother—does father think as you do?”

“I doubt it, but you never can tell,” said Helen. “Your father hasn’t spoken to me at any length about his ideas of love—not for a long time.”

“I’m sure he wouldn’t agree with you,” said Hermione, “and neither do I. Your praise of truth gives me courage to say I don’t think all the people I know, except you, are wrong, nor that what seems their happiness is an illusion. For myself I want the kind of happiness I believe they really have. I shall never understand how you, so beautiful and so clever, with a husband you had chosen yourself from so many splendid suitors, could throw yourself away on that person from Asia. I’ve tried to imagine just what was your state of mind when you ran off with him, but I can’t.”

“No, in that direction,” said Helen, “you failed rather notably. I come back to the scandal you spread. You told Charitas I went away because I couldn’t help myself—Paris took me by force.”

“It seemed the kindest version.”

“Oh—was there a choice of versions? What have I escaped—which were the others?”

“Oh, what’s the use, mother?” said Hermione. “I’ve owned up about the stories, and since you don’t like them, I’m sorry. You only make me angry by the way you examine me. I tried to do right, but you make me feel cheap.”

“If you were trying to do right, you have no cause to feel cheap,” said Helen. “But I suspect you were uncomfortable even at the time; I credit you with too much intelligence to think you knew what you were talking about.”

“I knew what I was about—I was telling a lie, for your sake, and also for the sake of the rest of us. I could have told more than one lie; I tried to choose the best. The first I thought of wouldn’t do—I had it out of old-fashioned poetry—that situation you get so often where the gods deceive the lover by a spell, and he doesn’t know who it is he takes in his arms, but afterward his eyes are cleared and he knows he’s been tricked. I was so desperate at first, I thought of saying Aphrodite enchanted you, so you thought it was Menelaus, but it turned out to be Paris. Don’t smile—I didn’t waste much time on that threadbare poetry. Then I could have said you went with Paris willingly, but that was so obviously disreputable, and I couldn’t explain it away. Besides, it was just what people were thinking. I saw it must be Paris taking you by force.”

“Very strange, considering what I was telling you only a moment ago about love,” said Helen, “but that first idea isn’t threadbare poetry, and if you had told it I should never have called it scandal, for it’s the truth. Paris couldn’t have stolen me against my will. In a sense I went of my own accord. But in the deepest sense the story would have been true—it was the spell.”