“I don’t want friendship. I want, oh, God! the unattainable. Judith, it is not what you have done. I am not such a cad as to judge you. I long since freed myself from the tyranny of an absolute thing called virtue. That isn’t the—the obstacle. At bottom I am a selfish brute, jealous and unreasonable. If there is another man in the world who has meant that much to you.... Oh, not that I blame him. If I had known you when you were another man’s wife, I wouldn’t have scrupled to take you from him. You are my other self. I have known it—from the moment I looked into your eyes, under the little apricot lamp. All my life I have been heart-hungry, wanting something I couldn’t find. Zeus cleft us apart, in the beginning of time. And now that you are here—” He set his teeth hard and his frame shook.
A long, long time they sat silent. The night settled about them and clouds covered the face of the moon. In the great house next door, lights gleamed here and there as the family came home and prepared for bed. Mrs. Trench had arrived in Hal Marksley’s touring car, with the girls. Apparently they had been for a ride. As she went to the back door, to be sure Drusilla had put out the milk bottles, she caught sight of the two motionless figures in the summer house. She went to the sun room and turned on a light that shimmered faintly through the Venetian blinds. Judith saw, without perceiving it. The whole irony of life lay between her and that impatient light.
The tower clock chimed eleven, when, like a stage illumination, the garden was bathed in golden glory. With a single impulse the two on the settee turned and looked up through the roof of the summer house, where the vines were thin. And there, in a little clear blue lake, piled high around the marge with mountains of sombre clouds, the yellow moon floated, serene and detached. Lary took the fevered hands between his cold, moist palms.
“Will you wait for me ... wait till I can search myself? Perhaps there is a man, hidden somewhere in the husk of me. If I find him ... I will come and lay him at your feet.”
VI
Mrs. Trench was waiting for her son. She had dallied too long with that warning. She was in the door of the sun room at the first sound of his key in the lock.
“Larimore!” as he crossed the hall and made for the stairs.
“Yes, mamma. Why aren’t you in bed?”
“I have something to say to you. I don’t often meddle in your affairs; but there come times when it is a mother’s duty to speak. I wish you would be a little more careful in your associations with that Mrs. Ascott. She isn’t the pure, virtuous woman we thought her. She told me—in the most brazen way—that her husband ran away to Africa with another woman. Though what anybody would want to go to Africa for— But he wasn’t entirely to blame for leaving her. She had an affair with another man. A low scoundrel who pretended to be her husband’s friend. She told me, without the least bit of shame, that the only thing that saved her from breaking her marriage vow was—her father catching up with them, when the axle of their automobile broke—before they reached the yacht that they were going to Italy in ... alone ... not a touring party. Alone!”
The words poured forth in a disorderly phalanx. Larimore stood patiently waiting until the need for breath stopped her utterance. Then he said incisively: