23
“IT WAS DISAPPOINTING, at the very least, to find out that Guy was so stupid and that his aims were so small, his goals so petty,” she said. “Didn’t he want to make anything of himself? I have to confess this: that I found, years later, after I had given the whole affair many nights of hard thought, that I was less disturbed by the morality of it all than by the meanness of it, the smallness, the pettiness. I think that if he had been stealing on a grand scale, or if he had been plotting to murder his rich uncle, I might have—”
“No,” I said. “I don’t believe that.”
“Not what you’re thinking. Don’t keep interrupting me, Peter. I was going to say that I might have told myself that I could reform him. At least I would have thought that he was something to work with, some raw material with promise, somebody with aspirations, the sort of stuff from which I could make a guy who was going somewhere. Do you see what I mean?”
“In a way.”
“ ‘In a way. In a way.’ Listen, Peter: you weren’t looking at the world through my eyes. You weren’t looking for a life as a wife.”
“That’s a point,” I said.
“It sure is. If you had seen our little town as I did, you would have seen that the pickings were slim, boy. A guy with ambition would have looked like a good match, a good catch, even if his ambitions tended to overreach the limits of the law. Now do you see what I mean?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Now consider this: I wonder sometimes—or I used to wonder sometimes—how committed I really would have been to that idea of reforming him.”
“Are you just playing games with me?”
“No. At least I don’t think so. I’ve wondered sometimes—if he had been a glamorous bandit, a figure out of our folklore, the thief as hero—wouldn’t I have gone along with him? And wouldn’t I have been thrilled?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “How would I know?” I was quite glum.
“Well, it’s nothing more than speculation, because he wasn’t that kind of guy. And I could see that this particular guy was going nowhere, and nowhere was not where the Ariane of that particular time and place wanted to go.”
[to be continued]
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