Anne Douglas Sedgwick

“ Franklin continued to reflect. 'Well, yes, I understand that,' he said. 'But how can you make her feel it? Why weren't you sure long ago?'
'Oh, you ask me again why I was a fool,' said Gerald gloomily, 'and I can only reply that Helen was too clever. After all, falling in love is suddenly seeing something and wanting something, isn't it? Well, Helen never let me see and never let me want.'
'Yes, that's just the trouble. She's let you see, so that you do want, now. But that can't be very satisfactory to her, can it?' said Franklin, with all his impartiality. ”

“ Why, Miss Buckston could set you to something at once. Knowledge is always of use, isn't it, Miss Buckston?'
'Yes, if one cares enough about things to put them through,' said Miss Buckston. 'I always tell Althea that she might make herself very useful to me.'
'Exactly,' said Franklin. 'And she does care. All you need do, Althea, is to harness yourself. You mustn't drift.'
'The number of drifting American women one sees over here!' Miss Buckston ejaculated; to which Franklin cheerfully replied: 'Oh, we'll work them all in; they are of use to us in their own way, though they often don't know it. ”

“ Do you always behave like a gentle muse?'
'Do I seem to behave like a muse? How tiresome I must be,' smiled Althea.
'Not tiresome, rather impressive. It's like looking up suddenly from some nocturnal fête—all Japanese lanterns and fireworks—and seeing the moon gazing down serenely and unseeingly upon one; it startles and sobers one a little, you know.'
'I suppose you are sober sometimes,' said Althea, continuing to smile.
'Lord, yes!' Gerald laughed. 'Really and truly, Miss Jakes, I'm only playing at being a child, you know. I'm quite a serious person. ”

“ Helen, lying on her divan, saw the pictures of comradeship filling the years. It was her consciousness of what the real meaning of the pictures was that supplied something else, something hidden and desperate that pulsed in them all. How she remembered the first time that she had drawn away when Gerald kissed her, putting up between them the shield of a lightly yet decisively accepted conventionality. They were 'growing up'; this was her justification. How she remembered what it had cost her to keep up the lightness of her smile so that he should not guess what lay beneath. ”

“ For Gerald, she was withered and burnt out. If she were to 'grow'—dear, funny phrases, even in her extremity, Helen could smile over them; even though she loved dear Franklin and enshrined him, his phrases would always seem funny to her—but if she were to grow it must be for Franklin, and in a different way from what he asked. She would indeed try not to become harder and drier; she would try to make of her life something not too alien from his ideal for her; she would try to pursue the just and the beautiful. ”

“ Althea, wrapped in furs, leaned in a corner and looked with an unseeing gaze at the dripping hedgerows and grey sky. She fastened herself in anticipation on the approaching brightness. Ah, to warm herself at the light of his untroubled, unquestioning, unexacting being, to find herself in him. If he would love her and charm her, that, after all, was enough to give her a self.
He was a little late, and Althea did not feel willing to face a public meeting on the platform. She remained sitting in her corner, listening for the sound of the approaching train. ”

“ For the sake of Helen's happiness he must measure not only Gerald's need of her against his own and Gerald's power against his own mere pitifulness, but he must wonder, in an agony of sudden surmise, which, in the long-run, could give her most, the loved or the unloved man. In all his life no moment had ever equalled this in its fulness, and its intensity, and its pain. It thundered, it rushed, it darkened—like the moment of death by drowning and like the great river that [Pg 302] bears away the drowning man. Memories flashed in it, broken and vivid—of Althea's eyes and Helen's smile ”

“ Yet Helen's intuition leaped at once to deeper significances. Looking out of the window at the lawn, bleached with dew, the trees, the distant autumnal uplands, while she quietly smoked her cigarette, it was as if her sub-consciousness, aroused and vigilant, held its breath, waiting.
'You know,' said Gerald, 'what I've always really wanted to do more than anything else. As I get older, I want it more and more, and get more and more tired of my shambling sort of existence. I love this old place and I love the country. ”

“ Good-bye, Helen.' She put out her hand.
'Oh, but don't—don't——' Helen clasped her hand, strangely shaken by impulses of pity and self-reproach that yet left her helpless before her friend's sincerity. 'Don't say you are going to give me up,' she finished, and tears stood in her eyes.
'I'm afraid I must give up all sorts of things,' said Althea, smiling desolately. 'If we hadn't got so near, we might have gone on. I'm afraid when people aren't made for each other they can't get so near without its breaking them. Good-bye. I shall try to be worthy of Franklin. ”

“ As the unknown lady in black Miss Buchanan had indeed charmed as well as oppressed her, and the charm grew while the oppression, though it still hovered, was felt more as a sense of alluring mystery. She had never in her life met any one in the least like Miss Buchanan. She was at once so open and so impenetrable. She replied to all questions with complete unreserve, but she had never, with all her candour, the air of making confidences. It hurt Althea a little, and yet was part of the allurement, to see that she was, probably, too indifferent to be reticent. ”

“ Althea had, at all events, been dragged from her mood of introspection. She had lost the sense of nonentity. She was conscious of a passionate, protesting self that cried out for justice. Who was Gerald, after all, to take things so for granted? Why should he be so sure of her? He was not her husband. She was his betrothed, not his wife, and more, much more was due to a betrothed than he seemed to imagine. It was not so that another man would have treated her; it was not so that Franklin would have handled his good fortune. ”

“ She had discovered the raw. Gerald was breathing hard.
'That must have been at first—when she didn't know him. They became great friends; everybody saw that Helen had become very fond of him; I never knew her to be so fond of anybody. You are merely angry because a man who used to be in love with you has fallen in love with another woman.'
So he, too, could lash. 'How dare you, Gerald!' she said.
At her voice he paused, and there, in the wet road, they stood and looked at each other.
What Althea then saw in his face plunged her into the nightmare abyss of nothingness. What had she left? ”

“ She took satisfaction in a memory of Miss Buckston's face singing in the Bach choir—even at the time it had struck her as funny—at a concert to which Althea had gone with her some years ago in London. It was to see, for her own private delectation, a weak point in Miss Buckston's iron-clad personality to remember how very funny she could look. Among the serried ranks of singing heads hers had stood out with its rubicund energy, its air of mastery, the shining of its eye-glasses and of its large white teeth ”

“ Helen was sitting at her writing-table before the window, and the morning light fell on her gracefully disordered hair and gracefully shabby shoulders. The aspect of her back struck on Althea's bitter, breathless mood. There was no effort made for anything with Helen. She was the sort of person who would get things without seeking for them and be things without caring to be them. She had taken what she wanted, when she wanted it; first Franklin, and then—and perhaps it had been before Franklin had failed her, perhaps it had been before she, Althea, had failed Gerald—she had taken Gerald. ”

“ To give yourself—you—you—to a man who doesn't love you—whom you don't love—for money. Oh, I know we've always talked of that sort of thing as if it were possible—and perhaps it is—for a man. But when it comes to a woman—a woman one has cared for—looked up to—as I have to you—it's a different matter. One expects a different standard.'
'What standard do you expect from me?' asked Helen. There were tears, but tears of rage, in her voice.
'You know,' said Gerald, who also was struggling with an emotion that, rising, overcame his control, 'you know what I think of you—what I expect of you. ”