“One man, one man!” She said it over. And his voice, his face, and small forgettable things—tricks of eye, of manner—came back upon her and possessed her. The woman the years had made rose in her. The man was hers. Because she had willed it, the boy had been drawn to her; because of her, again, he had found himself; with her he had fashioned the beginning of his man’s life; he and she had laid the foundations of it.
Could she let go all that had been so understandingly wrought to—what? Had the girl anything but her glorious flesh—any latent possibility of power to meet his need? She asked herself, with increasing calm, could she be sure her stimulated imagination had not deceived her. But when that look of his had first been hers, had she not known it as a fact, tangible as a hand to grasp? And was she so feeble as to repudiate the new fact because it stung?
No! She saw laid on him, ever so lightly, the touch of a younger, stronger vitality; and yet how fully aware was he? She knew so well his oblivious self-absorption, his mind incurious, slow to recognize the possibility of change. They had so grown to take each other for granted. She knew that anything threatening their mutual dependence could not come to him and leave him steady.
But her own position? It was that she sought in the labyrinth of her mind; but where reason had been was only a succession of violent emotions. She had been generous while she had been sure of him. Now the feeling of right that custom gives, the passion of possession, was fermenting in her. It consumed everything else.
What her strength could hold was hers. She wondered how strong she was. The strength of suffering! The wisdom of failure! Oh, she would hold him! How long? She put it away.
She turned back along the ringing beach. It was better, she thought, to be rooted like the cypress, even to be fastened in a great melancholy unrest, than to be as one of the gulls, flying on every wind, fishing at random.
The fog was lifting toward the north. The coast showed dark under it. There was something sterile in the thin black line of land across the waste of water, but she faced it rather than the deep-bosomed, soft-shadowed hills. But when, perforce, she turned her back on it to climb the “Miramar” terrace by a path through the oaks, she felt her high tension relax, a less triumphant confidence. Yet her eyes were calm, her pulse steady; she held her determination unwavering. Life thus far had taught her that of tenacity was the habit of success.
CHAPTER IV
LONGACRE RUNS AFTER
STEPPING on to the veranda, Florence found herself in a projected atmosphere of breakfast—the fine aroma of coffee, the strident gaiety of people not too well known to one another and denied the solace of breakfast in their rooms.