Dudley walked about nervously waiting for Julia to come. He would admit no fault in his view of her and he could not explain his uneasiness. At a recent exhibition his pictures had been unfavorably criticized. He decided that he had not yet accepted the inevitableness of a life of isolation.
When he saw Julia coming along the path his eyes filled with tears. It was cruel that a woman to whom he had opened his heart had closed herself against him in enmity. He loved her as he loved everything which had been a part of himself. She was yet a part of him, though she refused to understand it. She wounded him unmercifully. When she halted before him and looked at him he tried to forgive her. He fought back too much consciousness of his small undignified body. "Julia! Aren't you glad to see me?"
She allowed him to press her hand. They went on together, side by side. Dudley was afraid of her cold face. It made him the more determined to be generous to her and rise above what she was feeling. Psychically he wanted to touch her with himself. There was a kind of pagan chastity in her reserved suffering. Such a thing he had never been able to achieve and he could not bear it in others. "How does your husband feel about what you have told him, Julia?" His voice shook.
Julia said, "I think he's too big for both of us. He understands things that neither of us know."
Dudley would not allow himself to be jealous. He knew that he must embrace Laurence's experience in order to rise above it. "If he had the narrow outlook of the average man of his class he would condemn us both. Does he condemn me?"
"I'm sure he condemns neither of us in the sense you mean."
"I want to see him and talk to him," Dudley said. "I want to be the friend of both of you, Julia, in a deep true sense. Will he meet me? Will he talk to me?"
With a curious shock of astonishment Julia found herself ignored again. "I don't know. Yes, I think he'll talk to you." Her white throat strained so that it was corded with tension. She bit her lips.
Dudley observed this and became elated. He told himself that sympathy drew him to her, and he wanted to kiss her. But he withheld the kiss. He could not accept the burden of Julia's deficiencies. If he made a friend of Laurence Farley it would frustrate her in her undeveloped impulses. Dudley tried to admire himself for being strong enough to resist her for the sake of something she did not comprehend and might never appreciate.
He placed his hand on her arm. "Julia, how do you feel—now—about him—about you and me?" When she met his eyes, she noted in them the old expression of impersonal intimacy which ignored all of her but what he wanted for himself. He could endure everything but her reserve. He knew that she despised him for not allowing her to suffer alone. He had to risk that. It was preferable to being excluded from a life which had belonged to him entirely. He could not bear to return the privacy of emotion to any one who had appeared to him in spiritual nakedness.