If you've lost, you've lost.
If you can't keep your husband, let him go with a good grace.
It's possessiveness I don't understand."
"You might have understood it if you had ever married him."
"I don't think so. We weren't -" She smiled suddenly at Poirot. Her smile was, he felt, a little frightening. It was so far removed from any real feeling. "I'd like you to get this right," she said. "Don't think that Amyas Crale seduced an innocent young girl.
It wasn't like that at all!
Of the two of us, I was responsible.
I met him at a party and I fell for him.
I knew I had to have him -"
"Although he was married?"
"Trespassers will be prosecuted?
It takes more than a printed notice to keep you from reality.
If he was unhappy with his wife and could be happy with me, then why not?
We've only one life to live."
"But it has been said he was happy with his wife." Else shook her head.
"No. They quarreled like cat and dog.
She nagged at him.
She was - oh, she was a horrible woman!" She got up and lit a cigarette.
She said with a little smile, "Probably I'm unfair to her.
But I really do think she was rather hateful."
Poirot said slowly,
"It was a great tragedy."
"Yes, it was a great tragedy." She turned on him suddenly; into the dead, monotonous weariness of her face something came quiveringly alive.
"It killed me, do you understand?
It killed me.
Ever since, there's been nothing - nothing at all."
Her voice dropped: "Emptiness!" She waved her hands impatiently. "Like a stuffed fish in a glass case!"
"Did Amyas Crale mean so much to you?"
She nodded.
It was a queer, confiding little nod - oddly pathetic.
She said, "I think I've always had a single-track mind."
She mused somberly. "I suppose - really - one ought to put a knife into oneself - like Juliet.
But - but to do that is to acknowledge that you're done for - that life's beaten you."
"And instead?"
"There ought to be everything - just the same - once one has got over it. I did get over it.
It didn't mean anything to me any more.
I thought I'd go on to the next thing."
Yes, the next thing, Poirot saw her plainly trying so hard to fulfill that crude determination.
Saw her beautiful and rich, seductive to men, seeking with greedy, predatory hands to fill up a life that was empty.
Hero worship - a marriage to a famous aviator; then an explorer, that big giant of a man Arnold Stevensen, possibly not unlike Amyas Crale physically - a reversion to the creative arts; Dittisham!
Elsa Dittisham said,
"I've never been a hypocrite!
There's a Spanish proverb I've always liked.
'Take what you want and pay for it, says God.
Well, I've done that.
I've taken what I wanted - but I've always been willing to pay the price."
"What you do not understand," Poirot said, "is that there are things that cannot be bought."
She stared at him.
"I don't mean just money."
Poirot said, "No, no; I understand what you meant.