I felt an extraordinary exultation, an extraordinary tumult of delight, and—a degrading flush of shame. I felt myself blushing under his quiet gaze while the blood rushed over neck and cheeks and forehead. Both guilty and innocent I felt. The very sun and trees, it seemed, witnessed my nakedness. I stumbled as I moved beside my friend, and it was my friend who caught my arm and steadied me.
“Good God, Julius,” I remember stammering, “but what in the name of heaven are you saying?”
“The truth,” he answered, smiling. “And do not for a moment think of me as unnatural or a monster. For this is all inevitable and right and good. It means our opportunity has come at last. It also means that you have not failed me.”
I was glad he went on talking. I am a fool, I know it. I am weak, susceptible and easily influenced. I have no claim to any strength of character, nor ever had. But, without priggishness or self-righteousness, I can affirm that hitherto I have never done another man deliberate, conscious injury, or wronged a personal friend—never in all my days. I can say that, and for the satisfaction of my conscience I did say it, and kept on saying it in my thought while listening to the next words that Julius uttered there beside me.
“And so, quite naturally, from your point of view,” he pursued, “you are afraid for her. I am delighted; for it proves again the strength of the ineradicable, ancient tie. My union, remember, is not, properly speaking, love; it is the call of sympathy, of friendship, of something that we have to do together, of a claim that has the drive of all the universe behind it. And if I have felt it wise and right and necessary to”—he must have felt the shudder down the arm he held, for he said it softly, even tenderly—“give to her a child, it is because her entire nature needs it, and maternity is the woman’s first and ultimate demand of her present stage in life. Without it she is never quite complete....”
“A child!”
“A child,” he repeated firmly but with a kind of reverent gravity, “for otherwise her deepest functions are not exercised and——”
“And?” I asked, noticing the slight pause he made.
“The soul—her complete and highest self—never takes full possession of her body. It hovers outside. She misses the full, entire object of her reincarnation. The child, you see, was necessary—for her sake as well as for my own—for ours.”
Thought, speech and action—all three stood still in me. I stopped in my walk, half paralysed. I remember we sat down.