Mary Heaton Vorse

“ Godfrey was an artist in life, and he set himself to making the relation with Alison a perfect thing. He loved her with greater delicacy, with more imagination, with a higher degree of completeness than any one else could have done.
Such unions have an element of fatality to me. One is then so at the mercy of life; any alienation means such a terrible and mortal rending of the fibers of the spirit. ”

“ It seemed to me that the house was full of strange and awful whisperings; the very walls seemed full of the suspense and waiting that one feels where a spirit is struggling to take flight and the body is struggling to retain it. Toward morning I slept, but roused very early and dressed. Godfrey met me in the hall, and to my questioning glance:
"She's different," he hesitated. "She's very weak and very gentle. ”

“ At once Godfrey stripped from them both the possibility of decent pretense, if pretense there had been, and at the same time made Gloria his accomplice, for, as he walked to the door to meet Alison he turned, and with a gesture at once vague and passionate—a gesture which was as instinctive a reaction as that of a falling man who clutches at some support—he imposed silence on Gloria. ”

“ In marrying Alison there had to be a certain consecration. A man had necessarily to be sure of his own temperament before he had the right to join his life with hers. No man had the right to make her risk anything. The thing which I felt most keenly about Scarboro was that he lacked the unshakable quality that a man should have for such a marriage. There are only a few men and a few women who have that quality—who make you feel of them that they will go on caring from the other side of the grave. Godfrey was not one of these. ”

“ There is a limit, after all, to what a human being will endure of suffering. One thing came to me as definite—it had been forming itself in my mind from the beginning—and that was that without Godfrey and his love, radiant and complete, she could not live. As far as Alison was concerned, he was life itself ”

“ And so it seemed.
"I'll wait till noon and then I'll send for Carter," he told me. "It's absurd," he added, as if arguing with himself fiercely, "unless she's been brooding over something about her blindness. ”

“ The longest-living author of this work died in 1966, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 56 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works. ”