Again she asked if it were happiness, and still she could find no answer. The quickened vibration of the pulses, the concentration of thought upon a single presence, the restless imagination which leaped from the disappointment of to-day to the possible fulfilment of to-morrow—these things were bound up in her every instant, and yet could she, even in her own thoughts, call these things happiness? She told off her minutes by her heartbeats; but there were brief suspensions of feeling when she turned to ask herself if in all its height and force and vividness there was still no perceptible division between agony and joy.
For at times the way grew dark to her and she felt that she stumbled blindly in a strange place. From the heights of the ideal she had come down to the ordinary level of the actual; and she was as ignorant of the forces among which she moved as a bird in the air is ignorant of a cage. Gerty alone, she knew, was familiar with it all—had travelled step by step over the road before her—yet, she realised that she found no help in Gerty, nor in any other human being—for was it not ordained in the beginning that every man must come at last into the knowledge of the spirit only through the confirming agony of flesh?
"No, I am not happy now because he is not utterly and entirely mine," she thought, "there are only a few hours of the day when he is with me—all the rest of the twenty-four he leads a life of which I know nothing, which I cannot even follow in my thoughts. Whom does he see in those hours? and of what does he think when I am not with him? Next week in the Adirondacks we shall be together without interruption, and then I shall discern his real and hidden self—then I shall understand him as fully as I wish to be understood." And that coming month appeared to her suddenly as luminous with happiness. Here, now, she was dissatisfied and incapable of rest, but just six days ahead of her she saw the beginning of unspeakable joy. An impatient eagerness ran through her like a flame and she began immediately the preparations for her visit.
CHAPTER VI
THE FEET OF THE GOD
When Kemper, in an emotional moment, had declared that he would give up his trip to Europe, he had expected that Laura would see in the sacrifice a convincing proof of the stability of his affection; but, to his surprise, she had accepted the suggestion as a shade too much in the natural order of events. Europe, empty of his presence, would have been in her eyes a desert; and that any grouping of mountains or arrangement of buildings could offer the slightest temptation beside the promised month in the Adirondacks appeared to her as entirely beyond the question. If the truth were told he did immeasurably prefer the prospect of a summer spent by her side, but he felt at the same time—though he hardly admitted this even to himself—that in remaining in America he was giving up a good deal of his ordinary physical enjoyments. It was not that he wanted in the very least to go; he felt merely that he ought to have been seriously commended because he stayed away. Since he had never relinquished so much as a day's pleasure for any woman in the past, he was almost overcome by appreciation of his present generosity.
For a time the very virtue in his decision produced in him the agreeable humour which succeeds any particular admiration for one's own conduct. Of all states of mind the complacent suavity resulting from self-esteem is, perhaps, the most pleasantly apparent in one's attitude to others; and no sooner had Kemper assured himself that he had made an unusual sacrifice for Laura than he was rewarded by the overwhelming conviction that she was more than worth it all. In some way peculiar to the emotions her value increased in direct relation to the amount of pleasure he told himself he had given up for her sake.
When at last he had freed himself from a few financial worries he had lingered to attend to, and was hurrying toward her in the night express which left New York, he assured himself that now for the first time he was comfortably settled in a state which might be reasonably expected to endure. The careless first impulse of his affection would wane, he knew—it were as useless to regret the inevitable passing of the spring—but beyond this was it not possible that Laura might hold his interest by qualities more permanent than any transient exaltation of the emotions? He thought of the soul in her face rather than of the mere changing accident of form—of the smile which moved like an edge of light across her eyes and lips—and this rare spiritual quality in her appearance appealed to him at the instant as vividly as it had done on the first day he saw her. This charm of strangeness had worn with him as nothing in the domain of the sensations had worn in his life before. In the smoking car, when he entered it a little later, he found a man named Barclay, whom he saw sometimes at his club; and they sat talking together until long after midnight. Barclay was a keen, aggressively energetic person, who lived in a continual rush of affairs, which had not kept him from a decided over-development about the waist. He was married to an invalid wife, who, as he now told Kemper, was threatened with consumption and condemned to spend the whole year in the Adirondacks. Kemper had seen her once, and though she was neither pretty nor intelligent, he remembered her with respect as the owner of a property of forty millions. The knowledge of this fact covered her with a certain distinction in his mind, and because of it he condoned almost unconsciously the absence in her of any more personal attraction than that of wealth. The marriage, so far as he could judge, had been, from Barclay's point of view, entirely satisfactory—domestic affairs occupied no place whatever in the man's existence, which was devoted exclusively to speculation in stocks; and he had solved the eternal problem of philosophy by reducing life, not to a formula, but to a figure. Of scandal there had never blown the faintest breath about him; he paid apparently as little attention to other women as to his wife; and money, Kemper decided now, not without an irrational envy, appeared to satisfy as well as absorb his every instant.
"Yes, it's a great thing to get back to the woods now and then," Barclay was saying, "I usually manage to run up for Sunday—and then I find time to look over all the news of the week."