There was no peace except in the abnegation of all positive desire. She invited the peace of helplessness. When her emotions were formless she felt immense and lost in a waking sleep. The whole world was her own dream. She could feel her physical life fade out of her and imagined that her hair was growing white.
Charles Hurst had not been so happy for a long time. To evoke one of his moods of glowing pathos, he had only to gaze at himself in a mirror and think of Julia. She had committed herself but very little, yet he was mystical in his certainty of their future relationship. When he recalled the way she looked at him as if asking him not to hurt her too much he was confirmed in his belief that she had laid aside the subterfuges of more commonplace and less courageous women. "Damned if I look as young as I did!" He studied his reflection ruefully. He had a hazy perception of his outward defects and regretted them. "Growing old's hell all right! Poor little Kate!" He was ashamed of the comfort of seeming less his age than she. His sense of advantage made him tenderly apologetic. When he was near her he wanted to pet her. "Rum deal women get. Life after forty-five not worth much." He almost wished it possible for her to console herself as he did, but he could not quite bring himself to accept the logic of his imagining. Catherine with a lover! Women not the same as we are. Men are a lot of —— donkeys. Pity the girl never had a kid.
His pale eyes grew grave and retrospective again, and he seated himself on the edge of his bed just as he was, in socks and trousers and undershirt, burying his face in his curiously formless hands. "By God, I love that girl!" He threw his head up and shrugged his shoulders with a shivering motion, as if what he felt were almost too much for him. "She may think I'm a senile idiot and a damn fool—all the things Catherine does." He smiled, talking aloud. "But she loves me! She loves me! By God, she loves me! She's got to!" He ended on a playfully emphatic note as though he were disposing of an invisible argumentator. When he went into his bathroom to shave he whistled Musetta's Waltz from La Boheme. There was an expression of innocent complacency on his thin good-humored face. For a time he was absorbed in his music and his sense of completeness and well-being.
Julia Farley. Too good. That Goode family. Bills. Fellow runs a car like—Fast. Fast women. I hold her fast. I—
When his jumbled thoughts had proceeded to I-hold-her-fast, something welled up as if from the depths of him, and he was physically blinded by the dim intensity of his emotion. He frowned painfully. He began to speak aloud again. "Too much, Charles, my boy. Too old for this kind of thing. Damn! She's too good—too lovely—"
There was a knock at the door. Johnson, Mr. Hurst's man, was never allowed in the room while his master was dressing, since Charles was frankly embarrassed by the presence of a valet.
"Hello! Hello, Johnson."
"Telephone, sir. Mrs. Hurst wanted me to ask if you'd like to come, or if I was to tell them to call later."
Julia! The mad hope that it was Julia.