The day was of a new-washed clearness, but it seemed to her that someone had smudged it with a dirty hand; and in her breast was the vague longing that was like a hole there, while the clamorous voices, stilled for a little while, were taking deep breaths as if they would test their powers.
She blamed herself, she blamed her restlessness, but she looked frowningly at Morton, and while she owned her fault she could put the burden of some of it on his back. It seemed to Theresa that he loved the surface of her and would not look into the depths, that a principle of his life was to avoid looking into depths; and as she had been eager to know the evil of the world and the turmoil and the stain of it, and below that the great serenity, so she longed for a like capacity to see into his soul, to show him all, or nearly all, of hers. He baulked her constantly, and the more successfully, by his very ignorance of her need. Other barriers she had broken down, but here she failed.
She put an abrupt question as they rode home.
"Had you ever been in love before you saw me?"
"Never until I saw you, and now—for always."
He took for granted her own singleness of affection. He was benign, smiling a little, and content. Little flushes of colour came and went in her cheeks. She straightened herself, and then drooped in the saddle.
"You are tired," he said tenderly.
"No." And with a jerk she added: "I am cross."
That, too, he accepted without question. There was no doubt that he was very patient. He watched her as he rode close to assure her of his care, and when he helped her to dismount he held her for an instant, in spite of the groom; but, making no response, she hurried to her room and to her secret treasure there.
She was unpleasant all that evening and very much ashamed of herself, but she could not shake the blackness from her, though she tried. She heard in Morton's voice a distressing likeness to his mother's, and the way he handled his knife and fork seemed to her sufficient excuse for murder. At table she felt like a naughty schoolgirl, and she went early to bed; but as she sat beside her fire the remembrance of Basil standing, puzzled, in the hall as she went up the stairs, smote her with the shame she would have felt if she had hurt a child. She was not fit to have children—she, who had no self-control. She was capricious, vain, exacting. She asked more than she was willing to give, yet she was willing to give more than Basil asked. She knew she was endangered by his complaisance, and she wanted to be loyal. She would be loyal. She stared at the fire through mist and strands of hair, and slowly the mist gathered itself into drops that fell with a little crack on her silken petticoat. She was cold, though the flames were bright. She was not conscious of the room. All round her there was a dark loneliness like nothing she had ever seen or tasted. It was not the lonely terror of the sea, nor the great cleansing solitude of the mountains, but something formless, perilous. Now, everything was obscure, but she had a fear that if she could not save herself she would emerge into a clearness that would be terrible and enduring—a prison from which she could never escape, whose walls were formed of what was ignoble in herself.