“Yes.”
She bowed her head. “I wonder if you believe that. I think you do.” Then, in a flash, “Oh, Nick, we do lie to ourselves! I was wrong in a way. It’s possession you want, isn’t it?—abstract possession—ownership—gain!”
“Is that wrong?”
“You’re a man,” she said simply, and, with caught breath, “Thank God for that!”
He was careful, in the light of his experience, not to approach her, not to touch her. This time she should come to him.
“Come, Margaret,” he said; “don’t let us be fools.”
She looked across at him. So she was to move towards his chair, and sit at his feet—and sit at his feet. He would touch her hair, her hands, her shoulders. That would be yielding. That would be, very quietly, the end....
That would be extraordinarily like an oleograph—“in the firelight.”
She thrilled to laughter, and slowly, like recognition of an unfamiliar acquaintance, laughter came. It was as if she had wakened from some ridiculous nightmare; as if a shaft of light had fallen across a dim room, revealing countless absurdities that the dark had concealed. And laughter fled suddenly—stifled her a moment, and was gone.
In the stillness, she remembered—as something long passed—the sharp sound of her merriment. Looking round the room, she saw the piano standing open, and beneath its polished lid the black keys and the white. First it was their sharp contrast that seemed to interest her; then, as her attention dwelt on them, they assumed a certain power of reminiscence, of suggestion, as if they were symbolic of something outside themselves, something in the past peculiarly significant to her. With a mental process similar to that by aid of which dream and reality are separated until they stand recognizably on either side of the line between sleep and waking, with the laborious thought of one struggling against the last influence of a drug, she remembered how those black and white notes had imprinted themselves on her consciousness when, on that other occasion, Ordith had so nearly mastered her. The days intervening between that time and the present ran before her in swift procession. She saw herself as she was then; as she was now—then, fighting, determined, clear in mind; now, with even her will gone. By subtle process she had been changed, for the circumstances were unaltered. Slowly, day by day, by patience, by silence, by implied menace, by the bluff on which her father’s power depended, her fortress, unknown to her, had been undermined. Her father had come very near to winning, very near.