• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction
• Famous-Fiction
• Historical-Fiction

By Root 17382 0

‘make up’ to her for nothing. Who could say to what making-up might lead, into what consenting or pretending or destroying blindness it might plunge her? She loved him too helplessly still to dare to open the door by an inch to his treating her as if either of them had wronged the other. Something or somebody – and who, at this, which of them all? – would inevitably, would in the gust of momentary selfishness, be sacrificed to that; whereas what she intelligently needed was to know where she was going. Knowledge, knowledge, was a fascination as well as a fear; and a part precisely of the strangeness of this juncture was the way her apprehension that he would break out to her with some merely general profession was mixed with her dire need to forgive him, to reassure him, to respond to him, on no ground that she didn’t fully measure. To do these things it must be clear to her what they were for; but to act in that light was by the same effect to learn horribly what the other things had been. He might tell her only what he wanted, only what would work upon her by the beauty of his appeal; and the result of the direct appeal of any beauty in him would be her helpless submission to his terms. All her temporary safety, her hand-to-mouth success, accordingly, was in his neither perceiving nor divining this, thanks to such means as she could take to prevent him; take, literally from hour to hour, during these days of more unbroken exposure. From hour to hour she fairly expected some sign of his having decided on a jump. ‘Ah yes, it has been as you think; I’ve strayed away, I’ve fancied myself free, given myself in other quantities, with larger generosities, because I thought you were different – different from what I now see. But it was only, only, because I didn’t know – and you must admit that you gave me scarce reason enough. Reason enough, I mean, to keep clear of my mistake; to which I confess, for which I’ll do exquisite penance, which you can help me now, I too beautifully feel, to get completely over.’

That was what, while she watched herself, she potentially heard him bring out; and while she carried to an end another day, another sequence and yet another of their hours together, without his producing it, she felt herself occupied with him beyond even the intensity of surrender. She was keeping her head for a reason, for a cause; and the labour of this detachment, with the labour of her forcing the pitch of it down, held them together in the steel hoop of an intimacy compared with which artless passion would have been but a beating of the air. Her greatest danger, or at least her greatest motive for care, was the obsession of the thought that if he actually did suspect, the fruit of his attention to her couldn’t help being a sense of the growth of her importance. Taking the measure with him, as she had taken it with her father, of the prescribed reach of her hypocrisy, she saw how it would have to stretch even to her seeking to prove that she was not, all the same, important. A single touch from him – oh she should know it in case of its coming! – any brush of his hand, of his lips, of his voice, inspired by recognition of her probable interest as distinct from pity for her virtual gloom, would hand her over to him bound hand and foot. Therefore to be free, to be free to act other than abjectly for her father, she must conceal from him the validity that, like a microscopic insect pushing a grain of sand, she was taking on even for herself. She could keep it up with a change in sight, but she couldn’t keep it up for ever; so that one extraordinary effect of their week of untempered confrontation, which bristled with new marks, was to make her reach out in thought to their customary companions and calculate the kind of relief that rejoining them would bring. She was learning almost from minute to minute to be a mistress of shades – since always when there were possibilities enough of intimacy there were also by that fact, in intercourse, possibilities of iridescence; but she was working against an adversary who was a master of shades too and on whom if she didn