“And now you’ve seen—” Hugh asked. “Well?”
“I’ve seen that although you two are good friends, you’re not simple enough for Brenda, simple as you are, darling. I mean she’s a little too simple for you. It’s too obvious! People are such imbeciles when they try to evaluate friendships from the outside! But I, where you’re concerned, Hugh, don’t come in that class, do I? We are so close that I can evaluate your relations with people from the inside, as it were. There’s been a rapport built up between us through these most vital years of our lives,—fifteen to thirty, isn’t it? We don’t fool each other. And no matter how much you and Brenda flirt, and how openly, I can only sigh, now that I’ve watched you together here, and see that your heart isn’t in it. Poor Brenda! And it might have solved everything.... I mean, you stood some chance of normal happiness if you could only have found her simpatica. But you’ll never bring yourself to marry any one without that. Oh, you see, I know—I know....”
Hugh leaned up on one elbow and started scooping out a trench in the sand between himself and Joan. His dark head, silhouetted against the vivid blue-green of the noon Atlantic, was Grecian, Joan thought, in its beautiful symmetry. And his shoulders were as classic under the narrow straps of his damp bathing suit as they appeared when hidden under the most meticulously tailored of dinner jackets. “Fastidious strength. Strength to be used fastidiously. Aristocracy of body—as it is hardly known in the modern world,” Joan mused.
“And he’s mine. I’ve only to reach a finger across this trench. Whisper one word. What am I waiting for? Why can’t I take him as he is, and not expect perfection? Why do I want the moon? What do I hope for, better than this! If Michael and Hugh and Doctor Steiner could only be rolled into a composite person, that would be ideal. But they can’t. Hugh’s himself, and couldn’t be himself and have all their qualities added. And why must I cling to this perfectionist view of my life! Ah! That is still to be discovered. But why wait to understand myself perfectly? I needn’t stop being analyzed just because I’m married. And it isn’t as if marriage were irrevocable. It isn’t. Though of course one does hate to make mistakes, for marriage is important. At the very least mistakes with it are a waste of time. But it’s pride, really. I’m as proud as Lucifer and can’t bear to be caught out in a mistake, important or unimportant.”
Joan was talking for Doctor Steiner in these musings. She had almost forgotten the presence of the occasion of them, and Doctor Steiner’s emaciated face with its piercing but impersonal eyes was before her, in her imagination, more vivid to her than Hugh in the flesh. He was probing with herself into the depths of her psyche, watching with a whole mind’s powerful concentration for the one word that might turn the lock, explain to them Joan’s inability to live life as the majority of people do live it, discover the mystery of why she, almost alone in the world of civilized women, felt that if she could not give herself in her entirety to a marriage she could not give herself at all: in other words, that compromise was beneath her.
Doctor Steiner had often drawn her attention to the fact that compromise is the attitude necessary if one is to lead a normal, rational life. The gods, if there are gods, may live without it, but not mortals. Joan must forget her Luciferian pride, learn to be an ordinary mortal, if she hoped for happiness.
Last night she had dreamed, and written it down with minutest detail in her dream notebook kept for Doctor Steiner’s eyes alone, something which might help him to understand, more than any other dream she’d had since being analyzed, the secret of this inability to stoop to compromise with life. It was a dream which, given almost any interpretation, flattered Joan’s soul very much. She could hardly wait for Doctor Steiner to hear it and by its illumination pierce a little deeper with his so divinely impersonal vision into her mysterious depths. Indeed, she found herself looking forward to to-morrow afternoon, and the two hours he would give her in his office then, with a vast impatience. Would that it were here! After all, what could Laura Hunt-Smith’s house party offer in competition with two hours of Doctor Steiner’s active interest in one’s complicated soul states!
But Doctor Steiner’s keen face was beginning to disintegrate and form again into Hugh’s obtuse one. Hugh had completed his trench and was interrupting Joan’s train of absorbing thoughts by talking. And about Brenda Loring! Stupid of him! Joan was tired of Brenda. She herself had exhausted that subject, and here was Hugh keeping it up. He was saying, “There’s no question of sentimentality between us. Brenda and I are friends. And she has no more designs on me than I have on her. That’s one of the things I like about her. She’s so finely independent.”
“Perhaps not so independent as you think! She’s only human, dear boy, even if she does make fifty thousand or so a year out of that way she has with interiors. But I’m not pretending to understand Brenda. It’s only you I know so well. And I do think it may be rather a pity that you can’t bring yourself to be fonder of her.”
He responded nothing to that, and after a little she leaned forward and destroyed his trench, smoothing it out with her fingers. She was giving him her attention again, Doctor Steiner practically forgotten. She decided to speak gravely and simply.