Once more, when he could not but remember May, he recalled Julia instead. He did not explain to himself why he hated her so. It was as though she had done the world some terrible hurt and his was the arrogance of justice in leaving to her nothing of the self she wanted him to believe in. Whenever he saw falseness in women, he felt that he was seeing Julia at last. He wanted his thoughts to destroy her, or at least to leave her utterly beggared. He must prove to himself that it was women like Julia, women of the upper classes, that he had to fight. He could no longer bear the recollection of May going before him through the park in her short dress with her hair a silver paleness over her shoulders. Because of Julia, everything wounded him. He conceived a physical image of Julia in her ultimate day of degradation. When he thought of stripping everything away from her, it was to show a physical ugliness to a deceived world. In anticipation he purged his own soul of all that horrified and confused it. Then he saw her body—that he had never seen—lie before him like a beaten thing with used maternal breasts, and knew that he had destroyed forever the virginal falsehood of her face. No woman who belonged to a man as Julia belonged to Laurence had the right to a face like hers. He despised his aunt, but she was frankly a part of the hideousness of sex and his contempt for her was negative. Toward Julia he was positive, for he felt that when he had proved everything against her he would not be burdened with May. When he imagined Julia lean and hideous of body, the sense of intimacy with her made him gentle. He was strong and liberated.
However, when actuality presented itself, and he realized that if he met her she would be as he had always known her, kind and a little motherly toward him, his heart grew sullen, and, again, he was helplessly convicted of his youth. His defiance was so acute that he wanted to write her an obscene letter and tell her of what he had done and the women he knew. But he was trapped, as always, in the fear of appearing ridiculous.
It was difficult for him to justify his certainty that she was so much in need of the cleansing fire of truth; yet he would not abandon his conviction. When he had not dared to hate her he had been at loss before her. Now his hate permitted his imagination complete and unafraid abandon. He dared to relax in the intimacy of dislike because he fancied that he saw her clearly at last.
At times his hate grew too heavy for him, and he could have cried for relief in admitting his childishness to some one. He was shut into himself by that horrible laugh which surrounded him, which he seemed to hear from all sides.
It was a cool afternoon in September. May walked through the park between rows of flowering shrubs. Here the grass had died and the petals of fallen blossoms were shriveled ivory on the black loam. Overhead the treetops swung with a rotary motion against the rain-choked heavens. The heat of the clouds gathered in a blank stain of brilliance where the swollen sun half burst from its swathings of mist. The wind ceased for a moment. A clump of still pine tops glinted with a black fire, and behind them the sun became a chasm of glowing emptiness, like a hole in the sky, from which the glare poured itself in a diffusing torrent.
For a long time May had not dared to walk in the park. When she did go, at last, she told herself that she was sure Paul would not come. She felt herself inwardly lost in still bright emptiness. Cold far-off heat. She was a tiny frozen speck, hardly conscious of itself on the burnt grass, walking toward the tall buildings that receded before her. Tall roofs were like iron clouds in the low sky. She wanted to be lost, going farther and farther into emptiness. Now when she said Paul it was no longer Paul she meant. She would have been ashamed before him, tall, looking down at her. Paul was something else, something in which one went out of one's self into infinite distance. Where one went forever, never afraid. Where one ceased to be.
She passed women and children. A child stumbled uncertainly toward her, jam on its face, its dress torn. May was conscious of a part of herself left behind that could see the child running to its mother, the white dress brilliant, fluttering victorious. She knew how her own hair blew out in separate strands from the loosened ends of her braid, and how soft separate strands clung drily against her moist brow under her red cap. Going out of herself, it was as if her blood flowed coldly out of her into the cold sunlight, cold and away from her body. She was happy. There were tears in her eyes. She wanted to go on forever saying Paul and not thinking what it meant.
The sun went out of sight. The wind lifted the pine boughs and they moved as if in terror against the torn clouds. The sound that went through them died away in peace, in the happiness of being lost. May felt as if something of her had gone forever into the wide still sky and the dead shadowless park. She wanted to feel, not to think. When she thought, she was caught in her body as in a net. The separate parts of her were like pains where she thought Aunt Julia would loathe her.