“And even when he was trying to kill us,” she said to her lover, “I
felt for him down in the bottom of my mind. I can understand all the
horrible things, the humiliation—the humiliation! he went through.”
“Yes,” I said, “but I don’t see———”
“_I_ don’t see. I’m only trying to see. But you know, Willie, you are a
part of my life. I have known you longer than I have known Edward. I
know you better. Indeed I know you with all my heart. You think all
your talk was thrown away upon me, that I never understood that side of
you, or your ambitions or anything. I did. More than I thought at the
time. Now—now it is all clear to me. What I had to understand in you
was something deeper than Edward brought me. I have it now. . . . You
are a part of my life, and I don’t want to cut all that off from me now
I have comprehended it, and throw it away.”
“But you love Verrall.”
“Love is such a queer thing! . . . Is there one love? I mean, only one
love?” She turned to Verrall. “I know I love you. I can speak out about
that now. Before this morning I couldn’t have done. It’s just as though
my mind had got out of a scented prison. But what is it, this love for
you? It’s a mass of fancies—things about you—ways you look, ways you
have. It’s the senses—and the senses of certain beauties. Flattery too,
things you said, hopes and deceptions for myself. And all that had
rolled up together and taken to itself the wild help of those deep
emotions that slumbered in my body; it seemed everything. But it
wasn’t. How can I describe it? It was like having a very bright lamp
with a thick shade—everything else in the room was hidden. But you take
the shade off and there they are—it is the same light—still there! Only
it lights every one!”
Her voice ceased. For awhile no one spoke, and Nettie, with a quick
movement, swept the petals into the shape of a pyramid.
Figures of speech always distract me, and it ran through my mind like
some puzzling refrain, “It is still the same light. . . .”
“No woman believes these things,” she asserted abruptly.
“What things?”
“No woman ever has believed them.”
“You have to choose a man,” said Verrall, apprehending her before I
did.
“We’re brought up to that. We’re told—it’s in books, in stories, in the
way people look, in the way they behave—one day there will come a man.
He will be everything, no one else will be anything. Leave everything
else; live in him.”
“And a man, too, is taught that of some woman,” said Verrall.
“Only men don’t believe it! They have more obstinate minds. . . . Men
have never behaved as though they believed it. One need not be old to
know that. By nature they don’t believe it. But a woman believes
nothing by nature. She goes into a mold hiding her secret thoughts
almost from herself.”
“She used to,” I said.
“You haven’t,” said Verrall, “anyhow.”
“I’ve come out. It’s this comet. And Willie. And because I never really
believed in the mold at all—even if I thought I did. It’s stupid to
send Willie off—shamed, cast out, never to see him again—when I like
him as much as I do. It is cruel, it is wicked and ugly, to prance over
him as if he was a defeated enemy, and pretend I’m going to be happy
just the same. There’s no sense in a rule of life that prescribes that.
It’s selfish. It’s brutish. It’s like something that has no sense.
I———” there was a sob in her voice: “Willie! I _won’t_.”