When she did not answer him at once he was afraid again and began to kiss her. "You love me. You love me very much."
"Oh, you know I love you," Julia said. She wanted to cry out and to go away. He hurt her too much. Everything about him hurt her. She had a drunken sense of his disregard of her. She could no longer comprehend why she had come there and given herself to him. It was terrible to discover that one did irrevocable things for no articulate reason. She was less interested in Dudley now than in this new and terrible astonishment about herself. She could not believe that she had taken a lover out of boredom and discontent with herself, so she was forced to a mystical conviction of the inevitability of her act.
"I must leave you, Dudley. I can't bear to go. I love you. I love you." She kept reiterating, I love you, and felt that she was trying to convince herself against an uncertainty.
He regarded her curiously with the same uneasiness. "I may be going away soon, Julia. The French painter I told you about—the friend I had when I was in Paris. He's through with America now and wants me to go to Japan with him. Do you want me to go? I can't bear to be away from you."
"Go. Of course you must go." She felt hysterical. She took up her hat.
He could not endure the cold reserved look that came over her face. "Julia." Hating her, he put his arms about her, and when her body suddenly relaxed he resented its unexpected pliancy.
I don't know her, he repeated to himself with a kind of despair against her.
Julia unlocked the front door and stepped into the still hall. A neat mirror was set in the wall of the white-paneled vestibule. Here she saw herself reflected dimly. Everything about her was rich-colored in the afterglow that came golden through the long glass in the niches on either side of the entrance. The polished floor was like a pool. Julia felt that she had never seen her house before and this was a moment which would never come again.
When she went into the dining room she found the table laid, and the knives and forks on the vague white cloth were rich with the purplish luster of the twilight. The white plates looked secret with reflections. Beyond the table, through the French windows, she could see the darkness that was in the back yard close to the earth, but above the high wall at the end was the brilliant empty sky. The base of the elm tree was in the shadow. The top, with its new buds, glistened stiffly.