It was Bennet's letters that finally got me into trouble with Roger.
I had been engaged to him only a little more than two weeks, and I
must have dropped one of his letters in Roger's sitting-room, for on
arriving home from work one afternoon I found that he had come in my
absence, and, as Margaret warned me before I went up-stairs, seemed to
be in a "towering rage" about something.
He was walking up and down, and he swung around and glared at me
savagely as I stood in the doorway. He had a paper in his hand
(Bennet's letter), and his face was so convulsed and ugly and accusing
that involuntarily I shrank back as he came toward me. I have never
seen a man in such an ungovernable rage. He did not give me a chance
to say anything. There was nothing of which he did not accuse me. I
was a thing whose meaning I did not even know. He, so he said, had
been a deluded fool, and had let himself be led along by a girl he had
supposed too good to take advantage of him. Yet all the while, while I
was taking gifts--yes, the clothes on my back--and other favors, even
my position, which I kept only because of Mr. Forman's obligations to
him, I had, it seems, given myself to another man!
The accusations were so gross and monstrous and black that I could not
answer him. I knew what was in Bennet's letter--terms of endearment,
expressions of undying love, _and_ (this is where I came under the
judgment of Roger) the desire to see me soon again and hold me in his
arms.
Yes, Bob had held me in his arms,--he believed I was to be his
wife,--but I was not the thing Roger accused me of being. My relations
with Bennet were as pure as a girl's can be. It would have been
impossible for a girl to have any other kind of relations with a man
like Bennet. I stood bewildered under the storm of his accusations and
cruel reproaches, and the revelation of the things he had done for me
without my knowledge or consent. At first, as he denounced me, I had
flinched before him, because I was aware of having really deceived him,
in a way; but as he continued to heap abuse upon me, some rebellious
spirit arose in me to defy him. I had not had an Irish grandmother for
nothing.