CHAPTER XVIII FOOL'S MATE


Writing years afterwards of this event - in the rather tedious
volume of reminiscences which he has left us - Major Carruthers
ventures the opinion that the court should never have been
deceived; that it should have perceived at once that Miss Armytage
was lying. He argues this opinion upon psychological grounds,
contending that the lady's deportment in that moment of
self-accusation was the very last that in the circumstances she
alleged would have been natural to such a character as her own.

"Had she indeed," he writes, "been Tremayne's mistress, as she
represented herself, it was not in her nature to have announced it
after the manner in which she did so. She bore herself before us
with all the effrontery of a harlot; and it was well known to most
of us that a more pure, chaste, and modest lady did not live. There
was here a contradiction so flagrant that it should have rendered
her falsehood immediately apparent."

Major Carruthers, of course, is writing in the light of later
knowledge, and even, setting that aside, I am very far from agreeing
with his psychological deduction. Just as a shy man will so
overreach himself in his efforts to dissemble his shyness as to
assume an air of positive arrogance, so might a pure lady who had
succumbed as Miss Armytage pretended, upon finding herself forced
to such self-accusation, bear herself with a boldness which was no
more than a mask upon the shame and anguish of her mind.