Julia felt that even this last attempt to lose herself was a failure. While she stroked his hair, she was furtively considering whether or not she dared see him again.
Laurence knew now that his attitude regarding Bobby was apparent to Julia, and that it caused her pain. Why he punished her by keeping her apart from his son and making her ill at ease when the child was present he could not have said. However, though he realized absurdities in himself, he would not renounce his sense of righteousness. What he suffered through compunction was to him the pain of virtue. He hurt Julia in order to convince himself of her depth of feeling. While he observed her misery, he could believe that she would not betray him again. Her agony was his, but it showed him that she was not callous and indifferent to the consequences of her acts. He could not yet allow himself to express any love for her. He would not even admit his desire to do so. In the meantime, without understanding his expectation, he waited and withheld himself. When she looked at him there was always in her eyes the demand of self-pity. When she would accept, as he did, the recognition that there was nothing, that there could be nothing, he would not be afraid to give himself. He struggled with his tenderness for her. It was always tearing at him. He was never at rest. Because he put the thought of her out of his mind, he seemed to have no thoughts at all—only an emptiness consuming him. He tried to comfort himself with generalities and reverted to the illusory finality of the positivist philosophy which he had at one time professed.
Julia decided that self-loathing was the inevitable outgrowth of profound experience. Others, who were as fully self-aware as she, were filled with the same nausea of futility. She had several times talked to Charles Hurst on the telephone, and the sound of his voice always exhilarated her. When she sensed his emotion in speaking with her, a kind of iron seemed to enter into her despair. Her distaste for contact with him only convinced her of the pride of her recklessness. The more intimate their relationship became, the more voluptuously she scourged herself by her accurate perceptions of his deficiencies. Only by seeing him at his worst could she preserve her gratification in being tender to him and careless of her own interest.
Julia was continually irritated by the trivial routine of daily existence. The banality of life was humiliating to her. Always, before she went to the laboratory, she stopped in the kitchen to give Nellie the orders for the day. The poised indifference of the old woman's manner never failed to have an almost maddening effect. "Is the butter out, Nellie? Shall I order any sugar this week?" Nellie's opaque, self-engrossed eyes were continually fixed on some distant object. "Yas'm. I reckon you bettah odah sugah. Dey's plenty o' buttah." Julia smiled and tapped her foot on the bare, clean-scrubbed boards. "You're frightfully inattentive, Nellie." Nellie's full purplish lips pouted ruminatively. Her face was like a stone. "I always tends to what's mah business, Miss Julia. You has yo' ways an' I has mine." And Julia, in puzzled defeat, invariably left the kitchen.
When she encountered May, it was as bad. The girl's vapid, apologetic smile suggested the stubborn resistances of weakness. "Do you love your negligent Aunt Julia, May?" May would give a sidewise glance from soft protesting eyes. Then Julia, realizing that she should be touched by May's affection, would put her arms about the girl.
But Julia found herself actively disliking the child who forced upon her an undefined sense of responsibility, elicited by the exhibition of unhappiness. "Now, May, dear, I know you love me—you funny, sensitive little thing!" Julia's perfunctory tone was a subtle and deliberate repulse.
May, wanting to hide herself, pressed her forehead against her sleeve. Julia tried to pull May's arms apart, and wondered at her own satisfaction in the brutality of the gesture. It seemed to May that Aunt Julia's hands were about to tear open her heart. "Angry with me, May? This is so silly."
With an effort, May lifted her quivering face to Aunt Julia's cold eyes, and giggled. "Of course not." She wanted to keep Aunt Julia from looking at her and knowing her.