"Ah, Monica!" he exclaimed softly, teasingly, with a little smile. And she flushed, and flashed with anger.
"If you never knew, it was your own fault!" she jerked out.
"Really," he said, quoting and echoing the word as she had said it, and smiling with a touch of raillery at her, before he added:
"You always loved me really, but you loved the others as well, unreally."
"Yes," she said, baffled, defiant.
"All right, that day is over. You've had your unreal loves. Now come and have your real one."
In the next room Easu's child was sleeping in its odd little way, a sleep that was neither innocent nor not innocent, queer and naively "knowing," even in its sleep. Jack watched it as he took off his things: this little inheritance he had from Easu. An odd little thing. With an odd, loveless little spirit of its own, cut off and not daunted. He wouldn't love it, because it wasn't lovable. But its odd little dauntlessness and defiance amused him, he would see it had fair play.
And he took Monica in his arms, glad to get into grips with his own fate again. And it was good. It was better, perhaps, than his passionate desirings of earlier days had imagined. Because he didn't lose and scatter himself. He gathered, like a reaper at harvest gathering.
And Monica, who woke for her baby, looked at him as he slept soundly and she sat in bed suckling her child. She saw in him the eternal stranger. There he was, the eternal stranger, lying in her bed sleeping at her side. She rocked her baby slightly as she sat up in the night, still rocking in the last throes of rebellion. The eternal stranger, whom she feared, because she could never finally possess him, and never finally know him! He would never belong to her. This had made her rebel so terribly against the thought of him. Because she would have to belong to him. Now he had arrived again before her like a doom, a doom she still fought against, but could no longer withstand. Because the emptiness of the other men, Easu, Percy, all the men she knew, was worse than the doom of this man who would never give her his ultimate intimacy, but who would be able to hold her till the end of time. There was something enduring and changeless in him. But she would never hold him entirely. Never! She would have to resign herself to this.
Well, so be it. At least it relieved her of the burden of responsibility for life. It took away from her, her own strange and fascinating female power, which she couldn't bear to part with. But at the same time she felt saved, because her own power frightened her, having brought her to a brink of nothingness that was like madness. The nothingness that fronted her with Percy was worse than submitting to this man beside her. After all, this man was magical.