"You work now, but it is different. I don't mind this because it isn't working with madness. Just as you felt that you wanted your ambition, Ben, I felt that I wanted love. I was made so, I can't help it. Like Aunt Matoaca, my life has been swept and garnished for that one guest, and if it were ever to fail me, I'd—I'd go wild like Aunt Matoaca, I suppose."
A red bird flew out of the pines across the road, and lifting her eyes, she followed its flight with a look in which there was a curious blending of sadness with passion. The truth of her words came home to me, with a quiver of apprehension, while I looked at her face, and by some curious freak of memory there flashed before me the image of George Bolingbroke as he had bent over to lay the blossom of sweet alyssum beside her plate. In all those months George, not I, had been there, I remembered, and some fierce resentment, which was half jealousy, half remorse, made me answer her almost with violence as my arm went about her.
"But you had the big things always, and it is the big things that count in the end."
"Yes, the big things count in the end. I used to tell myself that when you forgot all the anniversaries. You remember them now."
"I have time to think now, then I hadn't." As I uttered the words I was conscious of a sudden depression, of a poignant realisation of what this "time to think" signified in my life. The smart of my failure was still there, and I had known hours of late when my balked ambition was like a wild thing crying for freedom within me. The old lust of power, the passion for supremacy, still haunted my dreams, or came back to me at moments like this, when I drove with Sally through the restless pines, and smelt those vague, sweet scents of the spring, which stirred something primitive and male in my heart. The fighter and the dreamer, having fought out their racial battle to a finish, were now merged into one.
We drove home slowly, the lights of the little Southern village shining brightly through a cloudless atmosphere ahead—and the lights, like the spring scents and the restless soughing of the pines, deepened the sense of failure, of incompleteness, from which I suffered. My career showed to me as suddenly cut off and broken, like a road the making of which has stopped short halfway up a hill. Did she discern this restlessness in me, I wondered, this ceaseless ache which resembled the ache of muscles that have been long unused?
After this the months slipped quietly by, one placid week succeeding another in a serene and cloudless monotony. Sally had few friends, there were no women of her own social position in the place; yet she was never lonely, never bored, never in search of distraction.
"I love it here, Ben," she said once, "it is so peaceful, just you and I."
"You'd tire of it before long, and you'll be glad enough to go back to Richmond when next spring comes."
At the time she did not protest, but when the following spring began to unfold, and we prepared to return to Virginia in May, there was something pensive and wistful in her parting from the little village and from the people who had been kind to her in the year she had spent there. We had taken several rooms in the house of Dr. Theophilus, who was supported in his prodigality in roses only by the strenuous pickling and preserving of Mrs. Clay; and as we drove, on a warm May afternoon, up the familiar street from the station, I tried in vain to arouse in her some of the interest, the animation, that she had lost.