Palmer laughed. "You can't judge about yourself. But all this excitement—and studying—and thinking—and God knows what—— You're not at all the woman I came abroad with."
The subject seemed to be making both uncomfortable; they dropped it.
Women are bred to attach enormous importance to their physical selves—so much so that many women have no other sense of self-respect, and regard themselves as possessing the entirety of virtue if they have chastity or can pretend to have it. The life Susan had led upsets all this and forces a woman either utterly to despise herself, even as she is despised of men, or to discard the sex measure of feminine self-respect as ridiculously inadequate, and to seek some other measure. Susan had sought this other measure, and had found it. She was, therefore, not a little surprised to find—after Freddie had been back three or four days—that he was arousing in her the same sensations which a strange man intimately about would have aroused in her in the long past girlhood of innocence. It was not physical repulsion; it was not a sense of immorality. It was a kind of shyness, a feeling of violated modesty. She felt herself blushing if he came into the room when she was dressing. As soon as she awakened in the morning she sprang from bed beside him and hastened into her dressing-room and closed the door, resisting an impulse to lock it. Apparently the feeling of physical modesty which she had thought dead, killed to the last root, was not dead, was once more stirring toward life.
"What are you blushing about?" asked he, when she, passing through the bedroom, came suddenly upon him, very scantily dressed.
She laughed confusedly and beat a hurried retreat. She began to revolve the idea of separate bedrooms; she resolved that when they moved again she would arrange it on some pretext—and she was looking about for a new place on the plea that their quarters in Half Moon Street were too cramped. All this close upon his return, for it was before the end of the first week that she, taking a shower bath one morning, saw the door of the bathroom opening to admit him, and cried out sharply:
"Close that door!"
"It's I," Freddie called, to make himself heard above the noise of the water. "Shut off that water and listen."
She shut off the water, but instead of listening, she said, nervous but determined:
"Please close the door. I'll be out directly."
"Listen, I tell you," he cried, and she now noticed that his voice was curiously, arrestingly, shrill.