Chapter VI: Part III (2)

Charles made the drive as long as he could, though he knew that his wife, with her prospect of guests at home, must be growing impatient. He kept, for the most part, in the park where it was easier to imagine that he and Julia were alone. In one place a hill cut off the city and dry grass rushed up before them against the cloudy sunset. Then there were masses of trees, green yet in the half darkness. The branches stirred their blackish foliage, and the copse had a breathing look. The last light broke through the shadowy clouds in metallic flames. When the city came into view again Julia thought that the tall houses were like the walls of a garden flowering with stars.

Every one but Charles was glad when the drive came to an end.

* * * * *

Under her large black hat the strange girl's eyes, deep with a shining emptiness, gazed into Paul's. Paul, glancing at her cautiously, felt that the eyes were filled with a velvet dust into which he sank without finding anything. It was as if he were falling, leaden and meaningless, through them.

She had a snub nose with coarse wide nostrils. Her mouth was thick-lipped and over red. She was given to abrupt hilarity when she showed her strong teeth in a peculiarly irrelevant laugh. Her voice was hoarse. When she threw back her head her amusement made her broad white throat quiver. Then her prominent breasts shook heavily. Her arms, bare below the elbow, looked as though they were meant to be powerful but had grown useless. Her insolence was stupid, but Paul envied it--even though it irritated him that she was so bored with him. They had sat on the same bench in a public square, and after they had fallen into conversation he had asked her to go to dinner with him. Her name was Carrie. She called him "son". She was "out for a good time," she said, but she was "broke".

Paul invited her to the working men's restaurant where he was going himself. To dramatize his isolation from his own group, he wore old clothes, brogans, and his school cap. His appearance suggested a mechanic's assistant. He was ashamed of his secret desire to admit his disguise to her. His uncle was a corporation lawyer who was becoming prominent. Paul had constantly to fight against an ingrained class vanity. Petty bourgeois! Not even snobbishness of the first order! When he had to face it in himself he wanted to die. No use! Hell of a world! Any disillusionment with himself strengthened his bitterness toward those of his own kind.

* * * * *

When Paul left Carrie he walked into the dark park and seated himself on a bench. The city seemed miles away, sunk in light. There was an iron stillness in the black trunks of the trees that rose about him. Over him the thick foliage hung oppressively in dark arrested clouds.

Despair. He wanted Carrie to admire him. He saw himself strong and bitter in the possession of all that Carries understand. He wanted to be kind. He was a great man, alone, a little proud of his madness. Child! He wanted to go far away--to die. Hate. I can't die! His heart beat loudly and the memory of Carrie was remote again.

In the hidden street Salvationists were passing. He heard hymn tunes and the beat of drums.

Dark angel. I want to save men. He thought of the women, strange in their tight dark dresses. He wanted to save them. Emotionalism. Rot. He tried to remember the working class and economic determinism. Facts. They kept things out. There was a dramatic pride in being outcast, in feeling himself definitely against his aunt and Uncle Archie. That kid, May. Dead. He gave himself to a sense of loathing that was gorgeous and absolute. His relaxation was drunken--like a dream.

Once more, when he could not but remember May, he recalled Julia instead. He did not explain to himself why he hated her so. It was as though she had done the world some terrible hurt and his was the arrogance of justice in leaving to her nothing of the self she wanted him to believe in. Whenever he saw falseness in women, he felt that he was seeing Julia at last. He wanted his thoughts to destroy her, or at least to leave her utterly beggared. He must prove to himself that it was women like Julia, women of the upper classes, that he had to fight. He could no longer bear the recollection of May going before him through the park in her short dress with her hair a silver paleness over her shoulders. Because of Julia, everything wounded him. He conceived a physical image of Julia in her ultimate day of degradation. When he thought of stripping everything away from her, it was to show a physical ugliness to a deceived world. In anticipation he purged his own soul of all that horrified and confused it. Then he saw her body--that he had never seen--lie before him like a beaten thing with used maternal breasts, and knew that he had destroyed forever the virginal falsehood of her face. No woman who belonged to a man as Julia belonged to Laurence had the right to a face like hers. He despised his aunt, but she was frankly a part of the hideousness of sex and his contempt for her was negative. Toward Julia he was positive, for he felt that when he had proved everything against her he would not be burdened with May. When he imagined Julia lean and hideous of body, the sense of intimacy with her made him gentle. He was strong and liberated.

However, when actuality presented itself, and he realized that if he met her she would be as he had always known her, kind and a little motherly toward him, his heart grew sullen, and, again, he was helplessly convicted of his youth. His defiance was so acute that he wanted to write her an obscene letter and tell her of what he had done and the women he knew. But he was trapped, as always, in the fear of appearing ridiculous.

It was difficult for him to justify his certainty that she was so much in need of the cleansing fire of truth; yet he would not abandon his conviction. When he had not dared to hate her he had been at loss before her. Now his hate permitted his imagination complete and unafraid abandon. He dared to relax in the intimacy of dislike because he fancied that he saw her clearly at last.

At times his hate grew too heavy for him, and he could have cried for relief in admitting his childishness to some one. He was shut into himself by that horrible laugh which surrounded him, which he seemed to hear from all sides.

* * * * *

It was a cool afternoon in September. May walked through the park between rows of flowering shrubs. Here the grass had died and the petals of fallen blossoms were shriveled ivory on the black loam. Overhead the treetops swung with a rotary motion against the rain-choked heavens. The heat of the clouds gathered in a blank stain of brilliance where the swollen sun half burst from its swathings of mist. The wind ceased for a moment. A clump of still pine tops glinted with a black fire, and behind them the sun became a chasm of glowing emptiness, like a hole in the sky, from which the glare poured itself in a diffusing torrent.

For a long time May had not dared to walk in the park. When she did go, at last, she told herself that she was sure Paul would not come. She felt herself inwardly lost in still bright emptiness. Cold far-off heat. She was a tiny frozen speck, hardly conscious of itself on the burnt grass, walking toward the tall buildings that receded before her. Tall roofs were like iron clouds in the low sky. She wanted to be lost, going farther and farther into emptiness. Now when she said Paul it was no longer Paul she meant. She would have been ashamed before him, tall, looking down at her. Paul was something else, something in which one went out of one's self into infinite distance. Where one went forever, never afraid. Where one ceased to be.

She passed women and children. A child stumbled uncertainly toward her, jam on its face, its dress torn. May was conscious of a part of herself left behind that could see the child running to its mother, the white dress brilliant, fluttering victorious. She knew how her own hair blew out in separate strands from the loosened ends of her braid, and how soft separate strands clung drily against her moist brow under her red cap. Going out of herself, it was as if her blood flowed coldly out of her into the cold sunlight, cold and away from her body. She was happy. There were tears in her eyes. She wanted to go on forever saying Paul and not thinking what it meant.

The sun went out of sight. The wind lifted the pine boughs and they moved as if in terror against the torn clouds. The sound that went through them died away in peace, in the happiness of being lost. May felt as if something of her had gone forever into the wide still sky and the dead shadowless park. She wanted to feel, not to think. When she thought, she was caught in her body as in a net. The separate parts of her were like pains where she thought Aunt Julia would loathe her.

* * * * *

When Laurence was apart from Julia and remembered her look of humility that asked for something she dared not state, he experienced an almost sickening pity for her. There was something in her suffering which he identified with his own. Yet he did not feel nearer to her in attributing their unhappiness in common to the futile and inevitable circumstances of human life. The pain of each of them, he told himself, was in realizing the isolation in which every human ultimately finds himself when he recognizes that his inner life cannot be shared. Laurence somehow exulted in seeing Julia forced to accept a condition of existence which had been plain to him for a long time. His despair was so complete that he imagined himself ready to abandon his defenses before her. But when he was actually in her presence she was only the thing that hurt him, and he was against her in spite of himself. Then her cruelty seemed monstrous, because she appeared to understand so little of what she had done. He knew that he bewildered her by showing no resentment toward Dudley Allen. Laurence despised her when she could not see the working of his pride that forced him to be superior to her lover's influence.

Often he said to himself, I'll go away. I can't bear it! But, while he believed in nothing outside himself, what was there to seek? He visited his parents more frequently. To be with them was a fulfilment of his humiliation. He would end where he was born, as every one else did.

Though he was certain that everything which developed through initiative was foredoomed to failure, his pride in Bobby increased. He wanted to keep his pessimism from contaminating his son. Bobby knew his power. When he encountered his father coming in from the laboratory alone it was a time to make a demand. "Hello, Dad! Say, Dad, _am_ I too much of a kid to run a motor cycle? Jack Wilson says I can't run his motor cycle because I'm too much of a kid! Say, Dad, I've got some money saved up. Can't I buy me a motor cycle? I can run it. Honest, I can!" He had been playing in the street, his face dirty and smeared with sweat, his shirt torn in front, and his collar askew. His look was rapt and self-intent. He had the air of pushing his father aside to reach some hidden determination.

Laurence was self-conscious when talking to Bobby. He lowered his lids to conceal the too lenient expression of his eyes. "You're not an experienced mechanic, you know. Only have one life to lose. Better wait a while before you risk it."

Bobby stared with an intentness that obliterated his father's pretense. "Aw, say, Dad, honest, now! I've taken Jack Wilson's machine to pieces. I can run a motor cycle all right. Go on and say I can get it!"

Laurence glanced up, and his smile was hard and cautious, but when his face was averted his features softened immediately. "We'll see, son. I don't think a brat like you could get a license. Time to talk about it later." He put his hat on a hook and, turning aside, began to mount the stairs.

Bobby, vexed and excited, gazed after his father, regarding Laurence's hesitation as an annoying but inevitable formula which had to be gone through before one could get what one wanted. "Oh, gol darn it!" he said, and ran out into the street again. He tolerated his father.

Laurence wished that he had sent May away with Mr. and Mrs. Price, the parents of his first wife. They had recently gone on a trip to Europe. When they had asked to take Bobby with them, Laurence had resented it.

Julia met Laurence in the upper hall. "Did you tell Bobby to come in and dress for dinner? Isn't he a ragamuffin!" She smiled, imagining that her pleasure in Bobby pleased her husband.

Laurence smiled also, but coldly. He would have preferred to ignore her relationship to Bobby. It had come over him strongly of late that he must take Bobby away from the home environment. "I'm afraid I encourage him in the spontaneity of bad manners." He walked past her with an agreeable but remote expression that put her away from him.

Julia experienced a familiar pang which contracted her breast with an almost physical surprise. It was as if a touch had made her guilty. Why, she could not say. He doesn't want me to show an interest in Bobby! She was robbed of another--almost her last--certainty.

At dinner she watched the father and son stealthily. Their attitude toward each other seemed to confirm her unknown guilt.

"I've sent off your first quarter's tuition at Mount Harrod, young man. You haven't much time left with us."

Bobby was secretly resigned but confident in his petulance. "Gee, Dad, I don't want to go to that place!"

"It's about time you began your initiation in the subtler forms of self-defense," Laurence said sardonically.

May, ignored by everybody, sat very straight in her chair and was over dainty with her food, as if timid of her enjoyment of it. Julia, withdrawing all attempt at contact with Laurence and Bobby, could not bear to look at the girl.

Laurence was uncomfortably admitting to himself that, in some subtle way, his desire to have Bobby out of the house was directed by a feeling against Julia. He wondered how much of his motive she had perceived. The sooner he gets away from the hoax of home, the better, Laurence told himself. He tried to exculpate himself by a generalization. It was the false ideal he wanted to destroy for Bobby. Julia was a part of the myth, though she had not created it.

* * * * *

Julia was wounded without knowing just what her wound was. She said to herself, unexpectedly, If I had a child! My God, if I had a child! The thought, which had been strange to her for a long time, seemed to illumine all of her being. It was as if something warm and secret were already her own. She was on the point of weeping with terror of her longing for the child that did not exist. It was something she wanted to take away to herself which no one else should know of. She considered how she might get herself with child without any one becoming aware of it. She wanted a child that would be helpless with her, that she could give everything to.

But she could not bear the thought of definite responsibilities connected with a child. It was wrong to want a child like that. It was like robbing a thing of its life to want it so completely. It had a right to itself. She felt virtuously bereaved already, as if the child that had never been born had grown to manhood and she had given it up.

There was no peace except in the abnegation of all positive desire. She invited the peace of helplessness. When her emotions were formless she felt immense and lost in a waking sleep. The whole world was her own dream. She could feel her physical life fade out of her and imagined that her hair was growing white.

* * * * *

Charles Hurst had not been so happy for a long time. To evoke one of his moods of glowing pathos, he had only to gaze at himself in a mirror and think of Julia. She had committed herself but very little, yet he was mystical in his certainty of their future relationship. When he recalled the way she looked at him as if asking him not to hurt her too much he was confirmed in his belief that she had laid aside the subterfuges of more commonplace and less courageous women. "Damned if I look as young as I did!" He studied his reflection ruefully. He had a hazy perception of his outward defects and regretted them. "Growing old's hell all right! Poor little Kate!" He was ashamed of the comfort of seeming less his age than she. His sense of advantage made him tenderly apologetic. When he was near her he wanted to pet her. "Rum deal women get. Life after forty-five not worth much." He almost wished it possible for her to console herself as he did, but he could not quite bring himself to accept the logic of his imagining. Catherine with a lover! Women not the same as we are. Men are a lot of ---- donkeys. Pity the girl never had a kid.

His pale eyes grew grave and retrospective again, and he seated himself on the edge of his bed just as he was, in socks and trousers and undershirt, burying his face in his curiously formless hands. "By God, I love that girl!" He threw his head up and shrugged his shoulders with a shivering motion, as if what he felt were almost too much for him. "She may think I'm a senile idiot and a damn fool--all the things Catherine does." He smiled, talking aloud. "But she loves me! She loves me! By God, she loves me! She's got to!" He ended on a playfully emphatic note as though he were disposing of an invisible argumentator. When he went into his bathroom to shave he whistled Musetta's Waltz from La Boheme. There was an expression of innocent complacency on his thin good-humored face. For a time he was absorbed in his music and his sense of completeness and well-being.

Julia Farley. Too good. That Goode family. Bills. Fellow runs a car like--Fast. Fast women. I hold her fast. I--

When his jumbled thoughts had proceeded to I-hold-her-fast, something welled up as if from the depths of him, and he was physically blinded by the dim intensity of his emotion. He frowned painfully. He began to speak aloud again. "Too much, Charles, my boy. Too old for this kind of thing. Damn! She's too good--too lovely--"

There was a knock at the door. Johnson, Mr. Hurst's man, was never allowed in the room while his master was dressing, since Charles was frankly embarrassed by the presence of a valet.

"Hello! Hello, Johnson."

"Telephone, sir. Mrs. Hurst wanted me to ask if you'd like to come, or if I was to tell them to call later."

Julia! The mad hope that it was Julia.

"It's Mr. Goode, sir. He says he can't give me the message."

God, but I'm ridiculous! "Mr. Goode, eh?" Charles, very abstracted, buttoned on his shirt. "Well, you tell Goode I'll call him later, Johnson." As Johnson, assenting in his delicately servile manner, was turning away, Charles beckoned him back. "Eh, Johnson, just between you and me, while the madam isn't looking. Suppose you bring me up--just a little, you know--Old Scotch. God damn this collar button!"

Johnson, who was a blond young man with a wise subdued air, smiled a little. Finding it flattered his employers, he had cultivated the sad manner of a professional mourner. "Very good, sir."

As Johnson disappeared, Charles's ruminations broke forth afresh. "'Very good, sir!' Damn little son-of-a-gun! He'd do well in a play. Got a fine contempt for the old man, Johnson has. Yep, by God, Catherine has got me on breeding. Servants never bat an eye at her. Might have been born with a gold spoon in her mouth. Well, she's a pink-face and the old boy's a rough-neck. Tra-la-la--" He resumed Musetta's Waltz.

"That Blanche--that damned little hyper-sexed, hyper-sophisticated, hyper-everything--By Jove, she'd pinch the gold plate out of a mummy's tooth!" When Charles talked he allowed his voice gradually to mount the scales until it broke on a falsetto note. It was part of the horseplay with which his dramatic sense responded, in self-derision, to the attitude of those about him. Catherine insisted on his occasional attendance at the opera, and Pagliacci, which he heard first, was his favorite piece. He identified himself with the title part, though it was a little confusing for him to imagine himself a deceived husband. He felt that the author of the libretto had confused the issue. "Blanche, by God, that Blanche!" He referred to a young woman who took minor parts in cinema plays. He wanted to be rid of her. She was statuesque and theatric, but as his intimacy with her had grown she had relapsed into habitual vulgarities which grated on him. Charles revered a lady. Besides, since becoming interested in Julia he wanted to forget everything else. Blanche was realizing that she had destroyed an illusion through which she might have furthered her ambition, and she was growing recklessly spiteful and crude. Only the day before Charles had sent her money which she had kept, though she reviled him for sending it. His humility made it impossible for him to condemn any one, except in extreme moments of self-defense. "Poor little girl! By Jove, I wonder if she did love me a little after all!" He shook his head, and smiled with an expression of sentimental weariness. He put Blanche away as incongruous with the thought of Julia which filled him with happiness.

"Sick o' the whole mess of 'em. That fellow, Goode, making a damn jackass of himself every time a chorus girl winks at him. The whole damn cheap, sporting, booze-fighting lot of nincompoops. Goode's a grandfather and he looks it."

The door moved softly, there was a light rap, and Johnson re-entered with a tray. Charles laid his hair brushes down. "Looks good to me, Johnson." Johnson smiled his sad, half-perceptible smile. "Shall I mix it, sir?"

"No--Johnson. No." With an air of ostentatious casualness, Charles poured whisky into a glass and held it up to the light. "Good stuff." Johnson kept his still smile, but did not speak.

Charles drank with deliberate noisiness. When he set the glass down he drew a deep theatric sigh. His face was solemn. "Better try some, Johnson."

The man flushed slightly. "Anything else?"

"No, no. Coming downstairs. The madam had her breakfast yet?"

"I don't know, sir. That is, I think so, sir." Johnson turned away and the door swung soundlessly across his rigid back.

Charles gave himself a little more whisky that brought the tears of relaxation to his eyes. He wondered if he were mistaken about Julia. He dared not consider future potentialities too definitely, though he told himself that, whatever came, he was ready for it. Would she ever let him put his head in her lap? He felt good and complacent when he imagined it. The pose it represented was assumed with such sincerity and was so remote from the aspect of him with which his wife was acquainted, or even the guise he bore to his sporting friends. It was pleasant to him to recognize this secret and not too obvious self. "Well, Charles, you old rooster, you may have broken most of the commandments, and you can't talk Maeterlinck and Tagore with the old lady, but there's something to you they all miss. The dear!" he added, thinking of Julia.

* * * * *

It was Saturday afternoon. The holiday crowd moved in endless double lines along an endless street. As Julia walked with it there was a hill before her and the stream of motor cars floated over the crest against a pale sky hazy with dust. Men stared at her and, feeling naked and unpossessed, she demanded their look.

"Miss Julia!" She glanced up, hearing a car whirr to a standstill beside her. Mr. Hurst was driving a gray racer. He was bareheaded. The wind had disarranged his sleek hair, revealing his baldness. He smoothed back the locks. He gazed at her a little fearfully, but his face was happy and intent. "I've caught you. Going anywhere? Let me take you for a ride?" He saw her eyes, the outline of her breasts, her cloth dress blown against her long legs, her ungloved hands with their beautiful helpless look. "You are tired." Tender of her fatigue, he was grateful to her because she allowed him this tenderness. His heart beat so heavily that he fancied it must be fluttering the breast of his silk shirt. She must think me a fool, dear girl! I love her! He was conscious of being a little mad in his delight, and wanted to lay his faults before her. "How's this? I'm going to run away with you--take you off to the country." Julia was beside him. The car glided on.

"I can't be long." Julia stared into his eyes with a calm smile, and tried to be simple and detached. She told herself that she could do nothing for him, but that she wanted him to understand her loneliness.

"Well, we're going to be long--ever so long." Her hair is all in a mess--clouds about her eyes. Her little feet walking on clouds. Oh, Julia, my darling, I love you! She's not like other women I have known. If she gives herself to a caress it means something to her. "I've been looking forward to this--longing for it," he said. "You know that ever since that night I kissed you I've thought of almost nothing but you?"

Julia said, "I'm sorry."

"Why?" All at once everything confusing was being swept away in the nakedness of the wind they rode against. "Going too fast for you--dear?"

"No. But you mustn't think of me so much."

"Why?"

"Because--I'm not worth it." Hypocrite. She wanted to be beautiful. She had a horrible sense of her own spiritual leanness and ugliness. If he would take me away--kiss me--anywhere--in darkness. She wanted to belong to some one so utterly as to make her oblivious of herself.

They turned a sharp corner. They were in the park now. Pale leaves, yellow against the light, floated, and fell upon them in a shower of silk. "I'm in love with you, Julia."

"Are you?"

"Don't _ask_. You know it. Don't you want me to be?" Goode--too good. Hadn't meant to say that yet!

"I don't know. I'm afraid I'm a disillusioned person. I'm tired watching people try to live through others. It can't be done."

"I think I could live in you--through you--if you'd let me, Julia."

"You don't know me."

"How can I if you won't let me, Julia?" He drew the car nearly to a standstill. He grasped her fingers with his free hand. "I'm going to kiss you, dear." It was lonely here. She felt his mouth over her face and was ashamed of her distaste for him. "You're unhappy, Julia. Why are you unhappy?"

She withdrew herself. "I am--horribly."

Charles, hardening, felt relieved, and imagined himself stronger. Farley don't treat her well, he said to himself. In his mind was a furtive expectation, with which was mingled an unadmitted thought of divorce. "Don't be, darling. You make me too happy. It's not fair. Can't I be anything to you--even a little?"

Julia laughed pathetically. "You must be. I'm here."

"Yes, thank God, you are. And you're not going to be disgusted with me because I'm such an unpretentious human animal? My taste in music runs about as high as The Old Oaken Bucket, and I suppose if I'd been left to myself I'd have canned those Dudley Allen productions you persuaded Catherine to buy, and hung up Breaking The Home Ties instead. You know all this new art stuff goes over my head, child. Hate me for it?"

"Not very much. Perhaps it goes over my head too."

"Wish it did, but Kate's told me all about you. You're so damned clever." He wanted her, yet, even if she offered herself to him now, he could not touch her. Her little feet. As a matter of fact they weren't small. Little feet just the same. Must be white. White feet. Lovely things walking over his heart. Beautiful things hurt him with their pride. He had felt this before about women. It was always wrong. Afterward only the pain and the longing remained. She's different. Mine. I can't have her. "You won't hate me when--" His eyes misted. He gave her a blurred look. His lips were humorous and self-contemptuous.

"Won't hate you when?" Julia was still motherly.

It hurt him to speak. His face was flushed. He stared at her fixedly an instant, as if something stood between them. She observed his unsteady mouth, that was weakly unconscious of itself like a desperate child's. "Am I going to have you, Julia? Are you disgusted with me, child?"

She would not consider clearly what he meant, but she wanted him to shut Laurence out of her mind. "Yes. I think so." Her voice was unsteady.

The car went on, they were out of town among suburban roads and vacant lots. Charles drew up again. "Let's get out and walk a bit."

The dry pinkish grass moved before them like a cloud over the field. It rustled stiffly about their ankles. The low sun was in their eyes. Double lines of gnats rose into the light. They passed an empty house with glaring uncovered windows.

White feet that hurt. Charles was afraid of her. He imagined her hands touching him. Oh, my dear! He said, "We must find a way to see each other."

Julia said nothing. He took hold of her arms hesitatingly. "Look at me!"

She was ashamed for him. When their eyes met, hers filled with tears. She seemed to herself dead, and wanted him to be sorry for her. I can't live. I'm dead already. No use. I'm dead! I'm dead! She wanted to be dead. Something kept alive, torturing her.

"Take your hat off, won't you?" She took her hat off. Clouds. "Now I can look at you." She wondered if she looked ill. She was ashamed for him when he trembled. Her eyes were gentle, and at the same time there was something desperate in them. It seemed to him that she was asking him to hurt her, and he wanted to say, Don't, don't! Her face, that he could not bear to understand, was just a blur of sweetness. He believed that her tenderness for him was something which must be tried by the grossness of his pleasure in physical contact with her. He thought his pleasure in her body would make her suffer. Afterward he meant to show her how little that was, and that what he was giving her--what he was asking of her--was really something else. "I want to be your lover, child." It was done. He was conscious of desperation and relief. She's different! My God, she's different! Blanche. All of them. He pitied himself with them.

Julia said, "I know it."

Why does she smile like that? Forgive me. He felt their two bodies, hers and his, pitiful helpless things. His shame was for her too. "Life, child! It's got us," he said. "Now I'll kiss you just once." He gathered her up in his arms. She's trembling too. She loves me! I want to make her happy. He wondered why everything hurt so. She's too fine.

Julia was cold. Frozen all over. It seemed he would never be done kissing her. She despised him, and enjoyed the bitterness of her gratitude in being loved. When she could speak she said, smiling yet, "We'd better be starting back. It's late. Look at the sun." The meadow was filled with cold light that lay on the grass tops and made them burning and colorless. The sun, as if dissolving, was formless and brilliant on the horizon.

"Have you had enough of me? Do you want to leave me, Julia?"

"No. It's only that when I left home it was for a little while."

As they walked back to the car, Charles, holding Julia's hand, pressed it apologetically. "I want to take you to a place I have, Julia--a cabin I go to sometimes for fishing trips. We could motor there and picnic for a day. Could you be with me as long as that without becoming more disillusioned?" He tried to joke. His thin face jested, but his pale eyes were anxious.

Julia said, in a smothered voice, "You mustn't love me too much. You are the one who will be disillusioned."

He wanted to talk to her about Laurence, but as yet did not dare; so he pressed her hand again. "Darling!" She returned the pressure and was piqued by his abstracted glance. I'm alone, she said to herself.

* * * * *

On the following Saturday Julia went with Charles to the cabin he had spoken of. It was on the shore of a small lake, only a few feet removed from the water's edge. It was a still cloudy day, and the lake, choked with sedges, had a heavy look, like a mirror coated with grease. There were pine woods all around that, without undergrowth, seemed empty. The still trees were like things walking in a dream. Julia felt them, not moving, going on relentlessly and spurning the earth. It seemed as if everything in the landscape had been forgotten. It was a memory held intact that no one ever recalled. A little group of scrub oaks were turning scarlet. They were like colored shadows.

Charles drew up his motor car in the half-obliterated roadway, and helped Julia to alight. He felt sinful, as he always did when he was about to enjoy anything. He wished that he might beg Julia to condescend to him as to an inferior being. He would be grateful for her contempt which, if it were tempered by affection, would allow him to be himself.

She went ahead of him, and waited in the dusty portico of the small house while he covered some cushions that might be wet if it rained. When he came toward her his eyes were uncertain. "Here we are. Damn it, Julia, I'm so happy I'm afraid! You aren't going to mind being here?" He carried a picnic basket.

"Of course not. Why should I have come?"

He set the basket down. "Hands all grimy. Why should you! God, I don't know. I'm going to love you." He swung her hands in his delightedly, but there was something stealthy and embarrassed in his manner. He could not bring himself to kiss her. "At least you're not going to try to make a new man of me!"

"I know my limitations."

"You haven't any, darling."

Julia's mouth was happy, but her eyes were dark and unkind. "It makes one uncomfortable to be thought too well of." She knew that she was about to give herself to him and resented his confidence. He was a crude childlike man. At the same time, she sensed a simplicity in him that was almost noble. Her self-esteem could not endure thinking of a possible debt to him.

"Shall we go in?" He opened the door and went in ahead of her. The place was crowded with camp beds, piled one on top of the other, and numbers of more or less dilapidated chairs. There was a thick coating of dust over everything, and films of spider web across the window panes yellowed the light. "Isn't this a disgrace, child? I ought to have had a house-cleaning before we came out."

"I like work. We'll clean up together." She removed her hat and laid it on a table. Charles took off his coat. He found an old broom, swept up the trash that littered the floor, and began to pull the furniture into place. Julia discovered a torn shirt and used it to clean the window glass. Charles felt the morning was passing grotesquely. I love her. What shall I do! "Jove, I wish we lived here!" he said. When he had laid a fire in the stone chimney, he pulled out one of the camp beds and made a divan with blankets and pillows. "Come sit down here and warm yourself, child." He turned his back to her and began warming his hands. "It's damp in here."

Julia came to the fire. She did not seat herself. He knew she was beside him. He put off the moment when he must look at her. As he finally turned, his suffused eyes avoided hers. He was smiling miserably. "Have I made a mistake?"

Julia felt blind inside herself. "Mistake?" She laughed nervously.

He fumbled for her hands. "Julia!" His emotion could no longer distinguish between her and himself. His face was in her hair. "I can't help it, child! I can't help it!"

Finding herself futile and inadequate, it seemed to Julia that her pity for herself must include all the things that surrounded her, and that she must embrace them in the mingled agony of self-contempt and pride. It was because she did not love him that it liberated her so completely to give herself to him. She tried to abase herself utterly so that she might experience the joy of rising above her own needs.

Her tears were on his hands and he was bewildered. The contagion of her emotion overpowered him. He was equally astonished at her and at himself. For a moment he was unable to speak. "Oh, Julia--my Julia--I love you!" He could not comprehend himself. Why was it that even now, when she surrendered herself to him, he continued to feel helpless and almost terrified. He had not imagined that she loved him as deeply as this. His desire to abase himself, though it arose from a different motive, was as complete as hers. "Julia," he kept repeating, "don't! What is it, Julia? Don't!" He wanted to kiss her feet. What is it? What have I done? He found himself at the mercy of something unknown that was cheating them when they should have had happiness. "Do you love me, Julia?" He observed her expression of tenderness and suffering. Yet, while she was telling him that she loved him, it seemed to him that he was ignored and obliterated by what she was feeling.

Julia sat on the camp bed and, as he had promised himself, he knelt beside her and buried his face in her lap. Still, though he did not admit it, he knew the gesture was false. He was embarrassed by his hostility to her pity. He believed now that he loved her far more than he had loved her before. He could no longer articulate his situation or his intentions, or anything practical connected with his life. He decided that, though she made him unhappy, life would only be endurable if he saw her more frequently and in a franker relationship. How this was to be brought about he dared not reflect. When Laurence's name was on his lips he recalled Catherine and the pain of indecision made him dumb.

Julia felt that even this last attempt to lose herself was a failure. While she stroked his hair, she was furtively considering whether or not she dared see him again.

* * * * *

Laurence knew now that his attitude regarding Bobby was apparent to Julia, and that it caused her pain. Why he punished her by keeping her apart from his son and making her ill at ease when the child was present he could not have said. However, though he realized absurdities in himself, he would not renounce his sense of righteousness. What he suffered through compunction was to him the pain of virtue. He hurt Julia in order to convince himself of her depth of feeling. While he observed her misery, he could believe that she would not betray him again. Her agony was his, but it showed him that she was not callous and indifferent to the consequences of her acts. He could not yet allow himself to express any love for her. He would not even admit his desire to do so. In the meantime, without understanding his expectation, he waited and withheld himself. When she looked at him there was always in her eyes the demand of self-pity. When she would accept, as he did, the recognition that there was nothing, that there could be nothing, he would not be afraid to give himself. He struggled with his tenderness for her. It was always tearing at him. He was never at rest. Because he put the thought of her out of his mind, he seemed to have no thoughts at all--only an emptiness consuming him. He tried to comfort himself with generalities and reverted to the illusory finality of the positivist philosophy which he had at one time professed.

Julia decided that self-loathing was the inevitable outgrowth of profound experience. Others, who were as fully self-aware as she, were filled with the same nausea of futility. She had several times talked to Charles Hurst on the telephone, and the sound of his voice always exhilarated her. When she sensed his emotion in speaking with her, a kind of iron seemed to enter into her despair. Her distaste for contact with him only convinced her of the pride of her recklessness. The more intimate their relationship became, the more voluptuously she scourged herself by her accurate perceptions of his deficiencies. Only by seeing him at his worst could she preserve her gratification in being tender to him and careless of her own interest.

* * * * *

Julia was continually irritated by the trivial routine of daily existence. The banality of life was humiliating to her. Always, before she went to the laboratory, she stopped in the kitchen to give Nellie the orders for the day. The poised indifference of the old woman's manner never failed to have an almost maddening effect. "Is the butter out, Nellie? Shall I order any sugar this week?" Nellie's opaque, self-engrossed eyes were continually fixed on some distant object. "Yas'm. I reckon you bettah odah sugah. Dey's plenty o' buttah." Julia smiled and tapped her foot on the bare, clean-scrubbed boards. "You're frightfully inattentive, Nellie." Nellie's full purplish lips pouted ruminatively. Her face was like a stone. "I always tends to what's mah business, Miss Julia. You has yo' ways an' I has mine." And Julia, in puzzled defeat, invariably left the kitchen.

When she encountered May, it was as bad. The girl's vapid, apologetic smile suggested the stubborn resistances of weakness. "Do you love your negligent Aunt Julia, May?" May would give a sidewise glance from soft protesting eyes. Then Julia, realizing that she should be touched by May's affection, would put her arms about the girl.

But Julia found herself actively disliking the child who forced upon her an undefined sense of responsibility, elicited by the exhibition of unhappiness. "Now, May, dear, I know you love me--you funny, sensitive little thing!" Julia's perfunctory tone was a subtle and deliberate repulse.

May, wanting to hide herself, pressed her forehead against her sleeve. Julia tried to pull May's arms apart, and wondered at her own satisfaction in the brutality of the gesture. It seemed to May that Aunt Julia's hands were about to tear open her heart. "Angry with me, May? This is so silly."

With an effort, May lifted her quivering face to Aunt Julia's cold eyes, and giggled. "Of course not." She wanted to keep Aunt Julia from looking at her and knowing her.

"You aren't, eh? Well, be a good girl. There!" A kiss, meekly accepted. How Julia abhorred that meekness! "Where's Paul these days? He hasn't run away to the South Seas or some such place without telling us good-by?" Julia felt guilty when she referred to him. But Paul and May were children. That explained away an unnamed thing.

"I--I don't know." Again May giggled.

"Why don't you go to see Lucy Wilson?"

"I don't know. I don't care much about going anywhere."

My God, what's to become of the girl! Why should she live, Julia thought.

* * * * *

Mrs. Hurst was finding it more and more difficult to face her husband. Something which was becoming chronic in his manner aroused a suspicious protest in her. When, in the morning, he entered the breakfast room and found her already seated at the table, she bit her lips, and between her brows appeared a little invariable frown. Charles was a mystery to her. She wanted him to be a mystery. The thing she had to fight against most was the recognition of his obviousness. A child! A ridiculous grown-up child! Quite incomprehensible. And when her reflections culminated too logically she put them aside with an emphasis on "the sacredness of sex". There were flirtations, trivial improprieties, she knew, and she admitted them. Perhaps all men were like that, spiritually so immature. But where the flesh impinged upon her dream there was only an excited darkness in which she defiantly closed her eyes.

"Mrs. Wilson is going out to Marburne this week, Charles. She's organizing a distributing center for the country women. They are quite out of touch with the city markets and some of them make such wonderful things--jams and embroideries, needlework and the like. She's trying to get coöperation from other people who summer there. She wants to build an industrial school for the girls, and is willing to put up a third of the necessary money if others will contribute the rest. She wants me to go out there with her and speak in various country schools." Catherine was resisting the conviction that something critical was occurring in her husband's inner life. The idea of going away from the city, and leaving him, in such a state, to his own devices, frightened her. To admit the necessity of remaining, however, was to concede the existence of an issue. When he looked at her, it was as if he said, I'm like this, but I can't help it, so forgive me. She did not wish to know what that look meant. For years she had warded off crises by merely ignoring their imminence. She dared not abandon the serviceable belief that the disturbing elements of life cease to confuse us if we refuse to admit that they exist. She called this, Rising above our lower selves. There is so much truth, you know, in the religions of the Orient. At the same time, Catherine's transcendental generalizations did not save her from bitterness. Life was difficult, and Charles had left her more than her share of responsibility for its solution.

Charles regarded his wife wistfully, almost sentimentally. He made a good-humored grimace. "Mrs. Wilson going to carry sweetness and light to Marburne, is she?" He was crumbling bread between his blunt unsteady fingers, and scattering it on the table cloth. What was he thinking of?

Catherine smiled at him, a perplexed resentful smile, a trifle hard. He was unhappy before her. There was something cold and watchful half-hidden in her eyes beneath her pleasantly wrinkled lids. "Mrs. Wilson is a very valuable, capable woman."

Charles grimaced gallantly but derisively. He was leaning one elbow on the table, and now he caught the flesh above his nose and pinched it with his thumb and forefinger as if to still a hurt. "Yes," he agreed with light absence. "By Jove, I know it! Every time I see poor old Jack Wilson it reminds me of how capable she is."

Catherine agreed to be amused, though her mouth was severe. "Ridicule is an easy way out of difficulty, Charles."

"Difficulty? Is it? Damn me, I wish it was!" He pushed his plate aside and pressed the fingers of both hands against his lowered brow.

Catherine, determinedly complacent, tapped her foot under the table and ate daintily. The nervous frown reasserted itself and she smoothed it away with an effort.

Charles lifted his head, as with a sudden sweetly-depressing resolution. "So you're going away. When?"

Catherine was diligently attentive to her food. "Perhaps I may not be able to go. I have so many important things--" She hesitated.

Charles rose, as if imperatively desirous of physical expression. He halted a moment by the table. Catherine had no name for his saccharine melancholy, but she detested it. "I haven't been such a hell of a husband, have I, Kate?" Ridiculous, she thought. She saw his mouth twitch. She was afraid. He touched her hair and she bore it. "Things might have been worse for you, Kate."

She sensed in his pity for her a phase of the pity for himself which supplied the excuse for all his shortcomings. "You'll muss my hair, Charles. I think life has treated me very well indeed--both of us, I should say."

"We men are a rough lot, but we mean well. Time for me to get down to the dirty world of commerce." His hand dropped away from her. He took out his watch.

White feet--he was tired.

Catherine did not glance up as he went out. She was hostile toward his disappearing back that was invisible to her. She laid her knife and fork very precisely on her plate. When she spoke to the servant who came to clear away the dishes, her manner, though kind, was peculiarly severe.

* * * * *

Charles had long ago definitely decided, though on no more than circumstantial evidence, that Julia had no life with her husband, and now he wanted her to the point of divorcing Catherine. Of course he had as yet said nothing decisive to either Julia or his wife. Until he was prepared to act it seemed to him unnecessary to speak.

It was night. He was in his room alone. Without removing his clothes he threw himself on the bed, soiling the handsome counterpane with his polished shoes. Mentally he reviewed the histories of those of his friends who had taken some such steps as he was contemplating. The more he thought about the domestic upheavals which he had noted from a safe distance, the more it was borne in upon him that, no matter how great his desire to avoid causing suffering, the moment he began to act positively, suffering for others would result from anything that he did.

Charles had never found himself able to inflict even a just punishment. Wherever possible he avoided the sight of pain. In the street he would go a block out of his intended way to evade the familiar spectacle of some wretched beggar. In doing so, his relief in escape was greater than his sense of guilt. If he was approached directly for whatever pathetic cause he always gave away everything that was in his pocket, and only asked that no one remind him of the occasion of his generosity. His wife was an efficient charity worker. Every quarter year he allowed her a sum--always above what her practical nature would have dictated--to dispose of in the alleviation of physical distress. He deferred to her common sense, and was glad to be relieved of the depressing knowledge of particular cases. As regarded legislative remedies for wrongs, he was conservative where his business dealings were affected, but had an open sympathy with revolutionary protests on the part of oppressed peoples in any far-off European or Asiatic state. He had persuaded himself that extreme measures were needed to compel fair play from the ancient orthodoxies abroad, while reformatory methods could achieve everything at home.

He decried the prevalence of divorce, and the disintegration of the home. Yet never, in a given instance, had he been able to condemn the friend or acquaintance who had become dissatisfied with his wife and sought happiness by forming new ties. Maternity in the abstract represented to him a confused and embarrassing ideal. But he recalled his own mother, who had never loved him, with a pain he did not attempt to analyze.