Amélie Rives

“ Miss Pickett could not follow the subtleties of Sophy's musing, she could only feel the pain that underlay it. She said gently:
"You mustn't deny love, honey, just because it's failed you. I don't ever want to see my child grow bitter."
"It's only one kind of love that I'm denying, Sue—not Eros, but Anteros ... the false god.... He comes in a lovely glamour. He's the rainbow on the foam of breaking waves. When the sea is still he vanishes. My bitterness is only against myself—for having worshipped a false god." ”

“ She found herself realising that she was Sophy Loring—just simply and painfully a woman who had seen her husband holding another woman in his arms.
As she faced this realisation, all of pride in her rose to announce, "I do not care." But no sooner had one part of her said this, than another part cried out that she did care—intensely, vehemently. She struggled to clear her mood. She asked herself harshly whether she had any love left for Morris. The reply came with mortifying promptness. Whether she loved him or not, she passionately resented another woman's loving him and being loved by him. ”

“ Sophy spent the rest of that summer and the following winter at Sweet-Waters. She did not wish to go among people so soon after her divorce, besides she felt the need of self-adjustment to her new relations with life.
That sense of being unreal in a world of unreality, which she had mentioned to Susan Pickett on the day of the divorce, lasted for some time. Then, in the early autumn—in her favourite month of October—began a recrudescence of the imperishable passion for life as opposed to mere existence, that lent her always the elemental charm of fire. ”

“ Supreme beauty, like supreme love, is never ridiculous. The gods wept over Icarus tumbling from his sire's chariot in mid-heaven. They would have tittered had it been lame Vulcan sprawling after his whirling hammer through the gulfs of ether. In the few seconds that Sophy stood transfixed, gazing down into that exalted young face, she understood how the legend of the moon's white stoop to Endymion had been invented. Not imagination so much as material beauty had been the source of the Greek myths. The artist and the poet in her ranged themselves on Loring's side. ”

“ Selene was now a domesticated planet. They moved in the same orbit. He felt, without realising it, somewhat as a lover might feel who, while gazing entranced at the silver disk in mid-heaven, suddenly finds himself transported among the Mountains of the Moon. The lunar landscape, thus familiarly envisaged, struck him as a little bleak. There was nothing "chummy" about Sophy, he decided. He had always thought it would be great fun to drink wine freely with the woman one was in love with. A "bully" dinner after hunting, or a cosy supper after the play, with plenty of champagne to enliven it. ”

“ There was an expression of supreme peace on his quiet face. "The peace that passeth all understanding" flashed through Sophy's mind. She shivered. This peace of Cecil's and that other divine peace were so cruelly removed one from the other. Yet this, too, was "past understanding" for all outside the black magic of its influence. The lamp turned the window-pane near which he sat into a dusky mirror. In its surface she saw repeated the sinister quiet of his profile, and through this reflection of his face dimly she saw the further landscape. ”

“ How much did Sophy know? What rôle would it be best for him to play? He had long dreaded this contingency. He knew that sometimes he overdosed himself with the drug. There were blank spaces in his life—gaps which he could not fill in with any sequence of events, try as he might. What had happened? What had he himself said or done? Had he left the hypodermic syringe where she could see it? Had Gaynor turned disloyal? One bit of clear reason rose dominant above the chaos of surmise. He must appear calm, no matter how violent the tumult of his secret self. ”

“ You know, Bobby darling, it's with hearts like the sky and the stars. There's room for all the stars in the sky—there's room for all sorts of different loves in one heart."
Bobby reflected a moment. Then he sighed.
"I reckon my heart ain't very big," he murmured. "It couldn't hold all that. I reckon my heart's just fulled up with you, muvvah. I reckon it's only got one star in it."
Sophy crushed him to her. She kissed him in a passion of remorse for his pathetic jealousy. Tears choked her. She held him until she thought that he had fallen asleep. ”

“ Amaldi said nothing. She had not yet heard the sound of his voice. But his eyes said: "Please come."
"Very well," said Sophy to Olive.
When she entered the ballroom, she felt, rather than saw, people turning to look after her. She had the oddest feeling of being glad that she was tall—that there was so much of her to feel that keen flame of life that had sprung up so suddenly within her.
A woman who admired her said to a man:
"Do look at Sophy Chesney! It does her good to be immured by her ogre. She's simply ablaze, to-night!" ”

“ Sophy imagined that he was pleading for the life of some one dear to him—a little child maybe. She just touched Amaldi's arm, and they went out again.
"I'm afraid it jarred on you—my going in there," she said softly, looking up into his face in the gloom of the narrow street. "But the places where the poor worship always draw me—they seem so real—I can't explain—but they move me—deeply."
"I understand," said Amaldi. "It is so with me, too."
"But I thought——"
She broke off.
"The faith of the simple-hearted is always moving," he said. "It isn't the faith of the people I question. ”

“ Sophy ran into the house with Bobby. She took him to the upper hall, and knelt down before a door that opened upon the railed roof of the front portico.
"Ah, be a man, Bobby," she pleaded. "You're the only man mother's got in all the world."
He stood with both arms about her neck. The bright, buff freckles showed up clearly on his pale little face. But with underlip thrust out and brows drawn down, his eyelids winking with every flash of lightning, he looked the storm firmly in the face, because "Muvvah" had begged him to be a man. ”

“ Every one has noticed how some trivial fact always imprints itself indelibly on one's mind in such ghastly moments. Opposite Sophy sat the beautiful Duchess of Maidsdowne. As Chesney shouted his insult at his wife, the blood rushed in a scarlet wave to the roots of the Duchess's chestnut hair, and the lovely, violent crimson glowed, painfully over-brilliant, on her cheeks for the rest of the evening. This agonised blush was the one thing that Sophy could ever clearly recall of the moments that followed. All went black about her the next instant ”

“ Reaction is a terrible exaggerater. Under its influence Sophy saw herself as a wretched puppet sewn together of rags of sentiment. If at the first she had been courageous, if she had said to him fearlessly: "Either things must be different or we must part," how much better it would have been than this long-suffering condonement of what she despised!
What was it in her nature, what hidden spring that had led her to act Griselda to two such men as Chesney and Loring? She knew herself fundamentally imperious, impulsive, not to be commandeered. ”

“ Olive continued, still in that musing voice. "What a divine place the world would be! Evwybody would be happy all the time, then. Nobody would be bored—nobody would divorce—nobody would be disagweeable."
"Nobody would need a God or a philosophy," supplemented Sophy.
"But as it is, they are most necessary," said Olive seriously. "Which is it with you, Sophy?"
"Both," replied Sophy. She was not smiling now.
"With me," said Olive, "it's first one and then the other. I'm afraid I've a very fwivolous nature, Sophy. I can't seem to keep to one thing, all the time. ”

“ Loring was out motoring, but Sophy said that she expected him any minute. He had meant to be back by the time they should arrive.
Belinda was quite composed at the idea of meeting Morris again. She had schooled herself for this meeting. An admirable phlegm was hers, as she sat stirring in the six lumps of sugar that she always put in her tea or coffee; she loved sweets like a harem woman. Wisdom had come to her with her eighteen years. She knew now that her "wisdom was to sit still"—that this is the highest wisdom of a woman in love with a man who is not in love with her. ”

“ The morning was wonderful—too bright and unveiled for an artist's pleasure, but not for that of mere human beings with youth and joy in their blood. The Tramontana was still blowing. The whole lake was a-flutter with it. The Fretta sped onward between jets of foam. Peder, the young meccanico, grinned with the wavelets, as an occasional spray-shower flew past him and sprinkled the sciori further aft.
The Marchesa was waiting for them on the terrace of Le Vigne. She gave Sophy a little nosegay of white oleander and stephanotis, and kissed her cheek in greeting. ”

“ Charlotte from her refuge in his strong neck spoke passionately. Her warm breath tickled him almost beyond endurance, but he held her and suffered in silence with the true martyr spirit of the husband who is born and not made.
"Oh, Joe," she murmured vehemently; "you're not a woman, so you can't see it all as I see it. Now, perhaps, it's all right, but in a few years ... just a few years.... Oh, my poor Sophy! The grey hairs ... will come ... then wrinkles.... Little by little, little by little, there, under his eyes—his hateful young eyes—she will grow old. ”

“ He went over impulsively and stood close to her.
"Sophy," he said, "what is it you really want?"
Her answer gushed quick and hot like heart's blood:
"My freedom, Morris!... My freedom ... my freedom!" It was like the breaking of the waters. It poured in a cataract of passionate, breathless words. "Oh, be kind ... be generous, let me go, without haggling ... without bitterness.... We owe it to the past to part as friends. We should be big in this big thing ... get above littleness of every sort. Just because we have made a heart-rending mistake ... why should we be like enemies?... ”

“ She longed to talk with the old Marchesa almost as much as she longed to see Amaldi. To talk with his mother would lift some of the load of doubt and pain from her heart, she thought.
But when she mentioned this plan to her cousin, Sue looked anxious. She was thinking of Lady Wychcote—of what she might think and say when she heard that Sophy was going to Italy. Her native shrewdness would lead her to surmise something very like the truth, Sue felt sure, while her dislike for Sophy would cause her to put the worst construction on it. ”

“ But there was no sporting spirit to sustain him in the rôle of husband. A wife was not game to be stalked. She was a possession to be enjoyed. Sophy must learn that as Selene she was goddess to his Endymion—but as Mrs. Morris Loring, she was, well, wife to her husband.
Loring had an astonishing power of sustaining ill temper. He could keep a grievance alive for months by merely muttering over the heads of the offense against him—as a lover can thrill himself by murmuring the beloved's name. ”

“ There is in the life of every artist, of every sensitive and lover, a supreme inspirational hour, wherein expression seems simple as breathing, and inevitable as birth and death. Amaldi, who was really great in music, played [Pg 427] that night as never until then, as it was never given him to play again. Grief and love, these are the mighty angels that urge genius to its fullest utterance.
As the music poured over Sophy its splendid and tumultuous mystery, she felt like one chained upon a rock that the high tide overwhelms ... drowning, suffocating in that passionate welter of sound. ”