The round black eye of the mirror looked at them. Their figures would be
there, hers and Richard's, at the bottom of the black crystal bowl, small
like the figures in the wrong end of a telescope, very clear in the deep,
clear swirl of the glass.
They were sitting close together on the old rose-chintz-covered couch.
_Her_ couch. You could see him putting the cushions at her back, tucking
the wide Victorian skirt in close about the feet in the black velvet
slippers. And she would lie there with her poor hands folded in the white
cashmere shawl.
Richard knew what you were thinking.
"You can't expect me," he was saying, "to behave like my uncle....
Besides, it's a little too late, isn't it?... We said, whatever we did we
wouldn't go back on it. If it wasn't wrong then, Mary, it isn't wrong
now."
"It isn't that, Richard."
(No. Not that. Pure and remorseless then. Pure and remorseless now.)
She wondered whether he had heard it. The crunching on the gravel walk
under the windows, stopping suddenly when the feet stepped on to the
grass. And the hushed growl of the men's voices. Baxter and the gardener.
They had come to see whether the light would go out again behind the
yellow blinds as it had gone out last night.
If you were a coward; if you had wanted to get off scot-free, it was too
late.
Richard knows I'm not a coward. Funk wouldn't keep me from him. It isn't
_that_.
"What is it, then?"
"Can't you see, can't you feel that it's no use coming again, just for
this? It'll never be what it was then. It'll always be like last night,
and you'll think I don't care. Something's holding me back from you.
Something that's happened to me. I don't know yet what it is."
"Nerves. Nothing but nerves."
"No. I thought it was nerves last night. I thought it was this room.
Those two poor ghosts, looking at us. I even thought it might be Mark and
Roddy--all of them--tugging at me to get me away from you.... But it
isn't that. It's something in me."
"You're trying to tell me you don't want me."
"I'm trying to tell you what happened. I did want you, all last year. It
was so awful that I had to stop it. You couldn't go on living like
that.... I willed and willed not to want you."
"So did I. All the willing in the world couldn't stop me."
"It isn't that sort of willing. You might go on all your life like that
and nothing would happen. You have to find it out for yourself; and even
that might take you all your life.... It isn't the thing people call
willing at all. It's much queerer. Awfully queer."
"How--_queer_?"
"Oh--the sort of queerness you don't like talking about."
"I'm sorry, Mary. You seem to be talking about something, but I haven't
the faintest notion what it is. But you can make yourself believe
anything you like if you keep on long enough."
"No. Half the time I'm doing it I don't believe it'll come off.... But it
always does. Every time it's the same. Every time; exactly as if
something had happened."
"Poor Mary."
"But, Richard, it makes you absolutely happy. That's the queer part of
it. It's how you know."
"Know _what_?"
He was angry.
"That there's something there. That it's absolutely real."
"Real?"
"Why not? If it makes you happy without the thing you care most for in
the whole world.... There must be something there. It must be real. Real
in a way that nothing else is."
"You aren't happy now," he said.
"No. And you're with me. And I care for you more than anything in the
whole world."
"I thought you said that was all over."
"No. It's only just begun."
"I can't say I see it."
"You'll see it all right soon.... When you've gone."