The Greater Inclination | Page 8

were growing jealous of
my past; that you actually hated Rendle! My heart beat like a girl's
when you told me you meant to follow me to Venice.
After our parting at Villa d'Este my old doubts reasserted themselves.
What did I know of your feeling for me, after all? Were you capable of
analyzing it yourself? Was it not likely to be two-thirds vanity and
curiosity, and one-third literary sentimentality? You might easily fancy
that you cared for Mary Anerton when you were really in love with
Silvia-- the heart is such a hypocrite! Or you might be more calculating
than I had supposed. Perhaps it was you who had been flattering my
vanity in the hope (the pardonable hope!) of turning me, after a decent
interval, into a pretty little essay with a margin.
When you arrived in Venice and we met again--do you remember the
music on the lagoon, that evening, from my balcony?--I was so afraid
you would begin to talk about the book--the book, you remember, was
your ostensible reason for coming. You never spoke of it, and I soon
saw your one fear was I might do so--might remind you of your object
in being with me. Then I knew you cared for me! yes, at that moment

really cared! We never mentioned the book once, did we, during that
month in Venice?
I have read my letter over; and now I wish that I had said this to you
instead of writing it. I could have felt my way then, watching your face
and seeing if you understood. But, no, I could not go back to Venice;
and I could not tell you (though I tried) while we were there together. I
couldn't spoil that month--my one month. It was so good, for once in
my life, to get away from literature....
You will be angry with me at first--but, alas! not for long. What I have
done would have been cruel if I had been a younger woman; as it is, the
experiment will hurt no one but myself. And it will hurt me horribly (as
much as, in your first anger, you may perhaps wish), because it has
shown me, for the first time, all that I have missed....

A JOURNEY
As she lay in her berth, staring at the shadows overhead, the rush of the
wheels was in her brain, driving her deeper and deeper into circles of
wakeful lucidity. The sleeping-car had sunk into its night-silence.
Through the wet window-pane she watched the sudden lights, the long
stretches of hurrying blackness. Now and then she turned her head and
looked through the opening in the hangings at her husband's curtains
across the aisle....
She wondered restlessly if he wanted anything and if she could hear
him if he called. His voice had grown very weak within the last months
and it irritated him when she did not hear. This irritability, this
increasing childish petulance seemed to give expression to their
imperceptible estrangement. Like two faces looking at one another
through a sheet of glass they were close together, almost touching, but
they could not hear or feel each other: the conductivity between them
was broken. She, at least, had this sense of separation, and she fancied
sometimes that she saw it reflected in the look with which he
supplemented his failing words. Doubtless the fault was hers. She was

too impenetrably healthy to be touched by the irrelevancies of disease.
Her self-reproachful tenderness was tinged with the sense of his
irrationality: she had a vague feeling that there was a purpose in his
helpless tyrannies. The suddenness of the change had found her so
unprepared. A year ago their pulses had beat to one robust measure;
both had the same prodigal confidence in an exhaustless future. Now
their energies no longer kept step: hers still bounded ahead of life,
preëmpting unclaimed regions of hope and activity, while his lagged
behind, vainly struggling to overtake her.
When they married, she had such arrears of living to make up: her days
had been as bare as the whitewashed school-room where she forced
innutritious facts upon reluctant children. His coming had broken in on
the slumber of circumstance, widening the present till it became the
encloser of remotest chances. But imperceptibly the horizon narrowed.
Life had a grudge against her: she was never to be allowed to spread
her wings.
At first the doctors had said that six weeks of mild air would set him
right; but when he came back this assurance was explained as having of
course included a winter in a dry climate. They gave up their pretty
house, storing the wedding presents and new furniture, and went to
Colorado. She had hated it there from the first. Nobody knew