There were no signs of a struggle in the walled garden where the espaliered peaches were just turning a deep rose and the pears, still green, hung in little clusters like enormous grapes. It was rather like being in a huge open greenhouse, so warm and damp was it there, with a haze of bees over the flowers and a deep continual buzz. There were no signs of a struggle. Violet’s gloves, her gardening basket and another flatter one filled with roses, stood in the path. But Ian had had to fight to get her to come and sit down on the bench, and she had only given in because he seemed about to become violent, and what was the use of a scene at this point?

So she sat, very erect beside him, in a pose so formal that she looked as if someone were taking her photograph. She had, it seemed, set up her whole physical being like a screen. And she did not turn her eyes in Ian’s direction, as she listened.

“Don’t you see? Can’t you understand?” he was saying “I thought I loved her. Hasn’t that ever happened to you?”

Violet just inclined her head. Indeed indeed it had happened and she had more than once when she was young imagined that such concentrated attention must be contagious, had thought because she was loved that she must be in love.

“She used to come on to New York for weekends—she was so eager and darling and so different from all the ambitious self-centered slightly overdeveloped women I knew in the theater, overdeveloped like an overdeveloped film I mean, their personalities so dreadfully underlined. She made everything seem wonderful…”

“Including you,” Violet said gently.

“Of course including me. Everything we did was magic—it really was,” he protested, as he saw the shadow of a smile on the aloof beautiful face turned away from him. “You don’t believe me.”

“Of course I believe you. But then what happened?” Now she turned and looked at him once curiously, intently. “The mirror broke, did it? You couldn’t find your reflection any more? Why not?” Now she was really interested suddenly. “For she hadn’t changed—”

“I don’t know,” Ian looked off, pressing the palms of his hands together as if he were locking something up inside him. “I don’t know, Violet—it’s too complicated. You see all her letters were full of you. I was jealous at first, a little—then I began to feel curious, then I felt I had to see you myself. Then…” he stopped and looked at her almost humbly, and Violet realized how young he was, with all his airs and graces, how much he needed to be liked, how vulnerable.

“Then?” But she was smiling now, what he read as an indulgent smile. At last she was listening to him as if he were a real person.

“Then I found out that innocence is both terrible and boring.” Now he had said it, he was afraid she would be angry.

Instead Violet sighed. “Yes. The mirror was too honest and too clear and perhaps too deep. It gave you back things you didn’t want to know about yourself, didn’t it?”

“I do think love is frightening,” Ian said wincing, as if at a blow. “It scares me. I don’t want to be needed that much.”

“You don’t really want to live, do you, Ian? You want to act. They seem to be quite different things.”

“But how can I act if I don’t live?” He turned on her almost angrily. “I’ve got to know people, people like you for instance. I’ve got to have a chance to learn,” he said passionately as if he were making love to her.

“People are hardly objects you can pick up and take to pieces to find out how they tick. You’re dangerous, Ian, you’re a menace,” she said gravely. “What you haven’t learned is that people with your charm are always in debt to life, Ian—we never quite pay it back.” She was unconscious of the change in pronoun. “You can’t use people. It’s too dangerous.”

“You do make me feel like a cad,” he said ruefully, but she knew as well as he did that as long as he had her attention, nothing she could say now would hurt, even if it did later. He was basking. “I wish I knew more about you and what has made you what you are.” This was a gentler tone, and it surprised Violet into honesty.

“But I’m nothing,” she sounded dismayed, “nothing at all, Ian. Sally’s fifty times the person I’ll ever be.”

“Why? I don’t see that. I don’t.”

“She asks more of life, of herself, of everyone around her than either you or I ever will. She looks at all this,” she said, letting her eyes rest on the trellised banks of sweet peas, “and wants to know what it all means. She never stops asking questions about things as they are in themselves. There’s a deep realistic root to her romanticism and that gives it validity. I have great respect for Sally,” she ended.

“So I gather.” Ian was perhaps ashamed. But Violet seemed to have forgotten him. “All my life I’ve felt guilty,” she said suddenly.

The last thing she had expected was to find herself confiding in Ian, but now she had begun, the moment held her and she must go on. Perhaps it was that Ian would be leaving and never come back, so she would not be called to account for what she said. Perhaps it was that she had truly recognized her buried self in him, herself as she might have been if she had not married Charles who had forced her both by his strength and his weakness to grow and to endure and to understand because she really loved him. “Don’t you see that it’s a frightful thing you’ve done to me—all this? That it’s brought back all the old guilt, the repeated pattern. I can’t believe quite that I’m responsible for what has happened between you and Sally, but it has happened before so it frightens me—not through my will, Ian, believe me…”

“I do believe you,” he said quietly. “I’m terribly sorry, Violet. Can you, will you ever forgive me?”

“Don’t be a fool,” she said harshly. “It’s myself I can’t forgive.”

“I don’t see why. It’s not your fault if you weave a spell, if people have to love you.”

“Yes,” Violet answered in a low voice, “it is my fault. In my heart of hearts, I suppose I want to be loved. You only call out of people what you want to call out. It doesn’t just happen. That’s the guilt,” she said, putting one hand on his. “And now,” she said, getting up, as if this small gesture had been too much. “It’s time we found Charles and Sally. It’s time,” she said with a delightful cool smile, “that we rejoined the innocents.”

Ian for once was speechless. He felt as if too much had been given him all at once, but he was darned if he knew quite what it was.