"Oh, Clive! How desperately sad! And, she is young and beautiful,
isn't she? Oh, I am so sorry for you--for you both. Don't you see,
dear, that I am not jealous? If you could be happy with her, and if
she could understand me and let me be your friend,--that would be
wonderful, Clive!"
He remained silent, thinking of Winifred and of her quality of
"understanding"; and of the miserable matter of business which had
made her his wife--and of his own complacent and smug indifference,
and his contemptible weakness under pressure.
Always in the still and secret depths of him he had remained conscious
that he had never cared for any woman except Athalie. All else had
been but a vague realisation of axioms and theorems,--of premises that
had rusted into his mind,--of facts which he accepted as
self-evident,--such as the immutable fact that he couldn't marry
Athalie, couldn't mortify his family, couldn't defy his friends,
couldn't affront his circle with impunity.
To invite disaster would be to bring an avalanche upon himself which,
if it wounded, isolated, even marooned him, would certainly bury
Athalie out of sight forever.
His parents had so reasoned with him; his mother continued the
inculcation after his father's death. And then Winifred and her mother
came floating into his cosmic ken like two familiar planets.
For a while, far away in interstellar space, Athalie glimmered like a
fading comet. Then orbits narrowed; adhesion and cohesion followed
collision; the bi-maternal pressure never lessened. And he gave up.
Of this he was thinking now as he sat there in her rose and ivory
room, gazing at the grey silk carpet underfoot; and all the while
exquisitely, vitally conscious of Athalie--of her nearness to him--to
tears at moments--to that happiness akin to tears.
"Clive, do you remember--" and she breathlessly recalled some gay and
long forgotten incident of that never to be forgotten winter together
when the theatres and restaurants knew them so well, and the day-world
and night-world both credited them with being to each other everything
that they had never been.
"Where will you live?" she asked.
He said: "You know I have sold our old house.... I don't know--" He
looked at her gravely and ashamed: "I think I will take your old
apartment."
She blushed to her hair: "Were you annoyed with me because I left it?"
"It hurt."
"But Clive!--I couldn't remain,--after you had become engaged to
marry."
"Did you need to leave everything you owned?"