In her bedroom Jenny examined the brooch. Perhaps what showed more clearly than anything the reality of her love was the affection she felt for Maurice when he was away from her. She was never inclined to criticise the faults so easily forgotten in the charms which she remembered more vividly. Now, with the brooch before her, as she sat dangling her legs from the end of the bed, she recalled lovingly his eagerness to display the unfortunate opal. She remembered the brightness of his blue eyes and the vibrant attraction of his voice. He was a darling, and she had been unkind about opals. He was always a darling to her. He never jarred her nerves or probed roughly a tender mood.
Jenny scarcely sifted so finely her attitude towards Maurice. She summed him up to herself in a generalization. In her mind's eye he appeared in contrast to everybody else. All that the rest of mankind lacked he possessed. Whatever mild approval she had vouchsafed to any other man his existence obliterated. She had never created for herself an ideal whose tenuity would one day envelop a human being. Therefore, since there had never floated through her day-dreams a nebula with perfect profile, immense wealth and euphonious titles, Maurice had not to be fitted in with a preconception. Nor would it be reasonable to identify her with one of the world's Psyches in love with the abstraction of a state of mind and destined to rue its incarnation. She had, it may be granted, been inclined to fall in love in response to the demand of her being; but it would be wrong to suppose her desire was gratified by the first person who came along. On the contrary, Maurice had risen suddenly to overthrow all that had gone before, and, as it seemed now, was likely to overthrow anything that might come after.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, she was hypnotized into a meditative coma by the steady twin flames of the candle and its reflection in the toilet-glass. She was invested with the accessories favorable to crystal-gazing, and the brooch served to concentrate faculties that would under ordinary circumstances have lacked an object. Contrast as an absolute idea is often visualized during slightly abnormal mental phases. Fever often fatigues the brain with a reiteration of images in tremendous contrast, generally of mere size, when the mind is forced to contemplate again and again with increasing resentment the horrible disparity between a pin's point and a pyramid. In Jenny's mind Maurice was contrasted with the rest of the universe. He was so overpowering and tremendous that everything else became a mere speck. In fact, during this semi-trance, Jenny lost all sense of proportion, and Maurice became an obsession.
Then suddenly the flame of the candle began to jig and flicker; the spell was broken, and Jenny realized it would be advisable to undress.
Action set her brain working normally, and the vast, absorbing generalization faded. She began to think again in detail. How she longed for to-morrow, when she would be much nicer to Maurice than she had ever been before. She thought with a glow of the delightful time in front of them. She pictured wet afternoons spent cosily in the studio. She imagined herself, tired and bored, coming down the court from the stage door, with Maurice suddenly appearing round the corner to drive weariness out of London. It was glorious to think of someone who could make the worst headache insignificant and turn the most unsatisfactory morning to a perfect afternoon. Quickened by such thoughts, she got into bed without waking May, so that in a flutter of soft kisses she could sink deliciously to sleep, enclosed in the arms of her lover as an orchard by sunlight.
About two o'clock Jenny woke up to another psychic experience not unusual with hypersensitive temperaments. The ardor of the farewell embrace had consumed all the difficulties of the situation discussed on the journey home. This ardor of merely sensuous love had lasted long enough to carry her off to sleep drowsed by a passionate content. Meanwhile her brain, working on what was originally the more vital emotion, brought her back to consciousness in the middle of the problem's statement. Lying there in the darkness, Jenny blushed hotly, so instant was the mental attitude produced by Maurice's demand. In previous encounters over this subject, her protagonists had all been so manifestly contemptible, their expectations so evident from the beginning, that their impudence had been extinguished by the fire of merely social indignation. Jenny had defeated them as the representative of her sex rather than herself. She had never comprehended the application of their desires to herself as a feasible proposition. They were a fact merely objectively unpleasant like monkeys in a cage, physically dangerous, however, with certain opportunities Jenny's worldly wisdom would never afford. In the case of Maurice the encounter was actual, involving a clash of personalities: the course of her behavior would have to be settled. No longer fortified by the hostility of massed opinion, she would be compelled to entrust her decision to personal resolution and individual judgment. For the first time she was confronted with the great paradox that simultaneously restricts and extends a woman's life. She remembered the effect of Edie's announcement of surrender. It had sickened her with virginal wrath and impressed her with a sense of man's malignity, and now here was she at the cross-roads of experience with sign-posts unmistakable to dominate her mental vision.
It was not astonishing that Jenny should blush with the consciousness of herself as a vital entity; for the situation was merely an elaboration of the commonplace self-consciousness incident to so small an action as entering alone a crowded room. Years ago, as a little girl, she had once woken up with an idea she no longer existed, an idea dispelled by the sight of her clothes lying as usual across the chair. Now she was frightened by the overwhelming realization of herself: she existed too actually. This analysis of her mental attitude shows that Jenny did not possess the comfortable mind which owes volition to external forces. Her brain registered sensations too finely; her sense of contact was too fastidious. Acquiescence was never possible without the agony of experience. Her ambition to dance was in childhood a force which was killed by unimaginative treatment. Once killed, nothing could revive it. So it would be with her love. In the first place, she was aware of the importance of surrender to a man. She did not regard the step as an incident of opportunity. All her impulses urged her to give way. Every passionate fire and fever of love was burning her soul with reckless intentions. On the other hand, she felt that if she yielded herself and tasted the bitterness of disillusionment, she would be forevermore liable to acquiesce. She would demand of her lover attributes which he might not possess, and out of his failure by the completeness of her personality she would create for herself a tragedy.
Finally a third aspect presented itself in the finality of the proposed surrender. She was now for the first time enjoying life with a fullness of appreciation which formerly she had never imagined. She was happy in a sense of joy. When Cunningham was playing in the studio, she had felt how insecure such happiness was, how impatient of any design to imprison it in the walls of time. Indeed, perhaps she had seen it escaping on the echoes of a melody. Then suddenly over all this confusion of prudence, debate, hesitation, breathless abandonment and scorching blushes, sleep resumed its sway, subduing the unnatural activity of a normally indolent mind.
She lay there asleep in the darkness without a star to aid or cross her destiny. She and her brooch of opals were swept out into the surge of evolution; and she must be dependent on a fallible man to achieve her place in the infallible scheme of the universe.