There was a fire in the bedroom and I sat down in front of it. Many
forces were warring within me. I was trying to fix my thoughts and found
it difficult to do so.
Some time passed. My husband's man came in with the noiseless step of
all such persons, opened one of the portmanteaux and laid out his
master's combs and brushes on the dressing table and his sleeping suit
on the bed. A maid of the hotel followed him, and taking my own sleeping
things out of the top tray of my trunk she laid them out beside my
husband's.
"Good-night, my lady," they said in their low voices as they went out on
tiptoe.
I hardly heard them. My mind, at first numb, was now going at lightning
speed. Brought face to face for the first time with one of the greatest
facts of a woman's life I was asking myself why I had not reckoned with
it before.
I had not even thought of it. My whole soul had been so much occupied
with one great spiritual issue--that I did not love my husband (as I
understood love), that my husband did not love me--that I had never once
plainly confronted, even in my own mind, the physical fact that is the
first condition of matrimony, and nobody had mentioned it to me or even
hinted at it.
I could not plead that I did not know of this condition. I was young but
I was not a child. I had been brought up in a convent, but a convent is
not a nursery. Then why had I not thought of it?
While sitting before the fire, gathering together these dark thoughts, I
was in such fear that I was always conscious of my husband's movements
in the adjoining room. At one moment there was the jingling of his glass
against the decanter, at another moment the smell of his cigarette
smoke. From time to time he came to the door and called to me in a sort
of husky whisper, asking if I was in bed.
"Don't keep me long, little girl."