'Damnably clever.
No one would guess meeting her that she was not the kindest, most generous, most gifted person in the world.
She knew exactly what to say to different people, how to match her mood to theirs.
Had she met you, she would have walked off into the garden with you, arm-in-arm, calling to Jasper, chatting about flowers, music, painting, whatever she knew to be your particular hobby; and you would have been taken in, like the rest.
You would have sat at her feet and worshipped her.'
Up and down he walked, up and down across the library floor.
'When I married her I was told I was the luckiest man in the world,' he said.
'She was so lovely, so accomplished, so amusing.
Even Gran, the most difficult person to please in those days, adored her from the first.
"She's got the three things that matter in a wife," she told me: "breeding, brains, and beauty."
And I believed her, or forced myself to believe her.
But all the time I had a seed of doubt at the back of my mind.
There was something about her eyes…"
The jig-saw pieces came together piece by piece, the real Rebecca took shape and form before me, stepping from her shadow world like a living figure from a picture frame.
Rebecca slashing at her horse; Rebecca seizing life with her two hands; Rebecca, triumphant, leaning down from the minstrels' gallery with a smile on her lips.
Once more I saw myself standing on the beach beside poor startled Ben.
'You're kind,' he said, 'not like the other one.
You won't put me to the asylum, will you?'
There was someone who walked through the woods by night, someone tall and slim. She gave you the feeling of a snake… Maxim was talking though. Maxim was walking up and down the library floor.
'I found her out at once,' he was saying, 'five days after we were married.
You remember that time I drove you in the car, to the hills above Monte Carlo?
I wanted to stand there again, to remember.
She sat there, laughing, her black hair blowing in the wind; she told me about herself, told me things I shall never repeat to a living soul.
I knew then what I had done, what I had married.
Beauty, brains, and breeding. Oh, my God!'
He broke off abruptly.
He went and stood by the window, looking out upon the lawns.
He began to laugh.
He stood there laughing.
I could not bear it, it made me frightened, ill. I could not stand it.
'Maxim!' I cried.
'Maxim!'
He lit a cigarette, and stood there smoking, not saying anything.
Then he turned away again, and paced up and down the room once more.
'I nearly killed her then,' he said.
'It would have been so easy.
One false step, one slip.
You remember the precipice.
I frightened you, didn't I?
You thought I was mad.
Perhaps I was.
Perhaps I am.
It doesn't make for sanity, does it, living with the devil.'
I sat there watching him, up and down, up and down.
'She made a bargain with me up there, on the side of the precipice,' he said.'
"I'll run your house for you," she told me, "I'll look after your precious Manderley for you, make it the most famous show-place in all the country, if you like.
And people will visit us, and envy us, and talk about us; they'll say we are the luckiest, happiest, handsomest couple in all England.
What a leg-pull, Max!" she said, "what a God-damn triumph!"
She sat there on the hillside, laughing, tearing a flower to bits in her hands.'
Maxim threw his cigarette away, a quarter smoked, into the empty grate.