“I was coming to hunt for you. Where have you been?” He spoke with surprise.
Eve looked at him once. Then she turned away. What a change in herself! Now she understood Cicely. Now she understood—yes, she understood everything—the things she had always despised—pettiness, jealousy, impossible hopes, disgrace, shame.
“I was afraid Cicely would be alarmed,” Paul went on.
And Eve was not offended that it was Cicely of whom he was thinking. It had not yet occurred to her that he could think of her.
She went in search of Cicely, who had nothing to say to her; then, excusing herself, she retreated to her room. Here she took off her dress and began to unbraid her hair. Then the thought came to her that Paul would go to the parlor about this time, that he would play a game of chess, perhaps, with the judge; hastily repairing the disorder she had made, she rearranged the braids, felt in the rough closet for her evening shoes, put them on, and went down-stairs again with rapid step.
Cicely made no remark as she came in; Paul and the judge were playing their game, with Hollis looking on. Eve took a book and sat reading, or apparently reading, at some distance. “Oh, how abject this is! How childish, how sickening!” Anger against herself rose hotly; under its sting she felt her strength returning. She sat there as long as the others did. “I will not make a second scene by going out” (but no one had noticed her first). She answered Paul’s good-night coldly. But when she was back in her room again, when there was no more escape from its four walls until morning, then she found herself without defences, without pretexts, face to face with the fact that she loved this man, this Paul Tennant, with all her heart. It was a surprise as great as if she had suddenly become blind, or deaf, or mad—“stricken of God,” as people call it. “I am stricken. But I am not sure it is of God!” That she, no longer a girl, after all these years untouched by such feelings—that she, with her clear vision and strong will (she had always been so proud of her will), should be led captive in this way by a stranger who cared nothing for her, who did not even wish to capture—it was a sort of insanity. She paced her room to and fro as she had paced the fringe of woods. She stretched out her hands and looked at them as though they had been the hands of some one else; she struck one of them upon her bare arm; she was so humiliated that she must hurt something; that something should be herself. “If he should ever care for me, I would refuse him,” she repeated, in bitter triumph. Immediately the thought followed, “He will never care!”
“I do not love him really,” she kept repeating. “I am not well; it will pass.” But while she was saying this, there came a glow that contradicted her, a glow before whose new sway she was helpless. “Oh, I do! I loved him the first day I saw him. What is that old phrase?—I love the ground he walks on.” She buried her face in her hands.
“How strange! I am happier than I have ever been in my life before; I didn’t know that there was such happiness!” A door seemed to open, showing a way out of her trouble, a way which led to a vision of subtle sweetness—her life through the future with this passion hidden like a treasure in her heart, no one to know it, no one to suspect its existence. “As I am to be nothing to him, as I wish to be nothing to him, I shall not care whom he loves; that is nothing to me.” Upon this basis she would arrange her life.
But it is not so easy to arrange life. Almost immediately she began to suffer, a species of suffering, too, to which she was unused: trifles annoyed her like innumerable stings—she was not able to preserve her calm; as regarded anything important, she could have been herself, or so she imagined; but little things irritated her, and the days were full of little things. She rebelled against this nervousness, but she could not subdue it; and gradually the beautiful vision of her life, as she had imagined it, faded away miserably in a cloud of petty exasperations and despair. After wretched hours, unable to endure her humiliation longer, she resolved to conquer herself at any cost, to set herself free; she could not go away, because she would not leave Cicely; there was still her brother’s child; but here, on the spot, she would overcome this feeling that had taken possession of her and changed her so that she did not know herself. “I will!” she said. It was a vow; her will was the strongest force of her being.
This very will blinded her, she was too sure of it. She was in earnest about wishing and intending to win in her great battle. But she forgot the details.