Bad times when a letter from him, written because he happened to be in the mood to write and wanted an answer which, though she knew his mood would have passed by the time he received it, yet she would not be able to prevent herself writing…. Times after he had been to see her, either on a flying visit, or to be near her for several days, taking her about and spoiling her delightfully…. After they were over came a bitterness that would make her moan out loud to herself, "It isn't worth it … it isn't worth it…." And she would welcome the next few days when they came as thirstily as she had the last.
Only the fact that she had a naturally strong will, made stronger by youthful years of self-repression, and that he never wished from a woman what she did not want to give, kept her so long not his lover in body as she was in heart and mind. Looking back, she marvelled at the length of time she had withstood her own heart. Not her senses; they had not entered into the affair for her at that time. She actually loved him too well, and was too unawakened physically, to feel the promptings of the pulses. She felt in him, for him, by him, so intensely it sometimes seemed to her she must be fused with him. She could have burned away into his being and ceased to have a separate existence if the passionate fusing of the mind could have accomplished it.
For three years she loved and suffered. She saw him always several times a year, was with him during those times, and he never lied to her about what he felt. He never told her she was the "only woman in the world for him" and that he could not live without her. He never mentioned other women to her, except such of his friends as she had met and of those she never knew, except in so far as her own intuition told her, which were only friends, which mingled the give and take of passion with the cooler draught. On the other hand, he never hid his passion when he felt it for her, and he always showed his affection and care of her when in the pleasant spaces between passion. He could not but know she was aware that he would be glad if one day she gave him more; meanwhile he did not make her hate herself and him with actions that would have excited without satisfying. He was the perfect companion, or would have been if she had not loved him.
For three years she never told him that she did; she met his kisses only with frank affection, and though she felt no urge of passion in herself to teach her lips, yet she began to feel that which would have made her more the eager one, and less the kissed, as she always sternly kept herself. For these three years she did not imagine he lived a chaste existence; there was no reason, with his pagan and quite genuine convictions, why he should. Fidelity in so far as it meant keeping to one person was to him foolishness. In so far as it meant loyalty of affection and absolute honesty he was faithful to everyone.
At the end of the three years she had become aware that things were different … at first she could not say how. Then she slowly saw that unless she gave more, made herself more to him, she would become less.
He made no demands on her; he would have resented the idea of possessing a woman as much as that of any woman possessing him—freedom to him was the salt of every dish. Judy told him sometimes that he made the marriage service of too great importance, just as much as did the advocates of it, though in a different way. They thought there ought to be no love outside it; he thought there could be none within-it. To her mind, which always went for the essentials and left the trappings alone, the actual legal compact would not have mattered either way. That was what her instinct, which in her was as nicely balanced as reason, told her. But there was a side of her, as was inevitable, which was the child of her period and upbringing, and that side had never been talked over by Killigrew's philosophy, with the result that when she gave him everything she suffered in her conscience as well as in her heart. She had suffered ever since. Truth was with her a passion, and yet she had to pretend to the world. She suffered acutely when with girls of her own age, because she felt unfit to be with them. Often, with Georgie, who had not half her fineness, she would feel she ought not to be sitting talking to her or letting her come and stay in the same house. She suffered sometimes from a morbid wish to tell the world what she really was. And yet, as she told herself sometimes, if suffering can purge, surely she was clean enough….
She had never breathed the word "marriage" to Killigrew, who had no reason for knowing she was not as happy as himself in what was too spontaneous and delightful even to be called an arrangement. It had been a "success"; the life they had lived since Judy had let him know he could take her as he wished. Killigrew would as soon have married as have installed a woman as his mistress; the freedom of a union libre held no illusions for him. Yet to do him justice it was even more that he would have hated to have their relationship spoiled by anything so hard-and-fast. They met as before, went for wonderful holidays together, and if she knew he was "fitting her in," she was too wonderfully poignantly happy when with him, too satisfied in every fibre of her nature, to think of it; while afterwards, if she had allowed herself to dwell on it—beyond the one or two days of acute suffering that would follow upon every time—she would have died, in heart and mind, if not in body, of the pain.
Sometimes, when she was either very happy with him or drowning in the bitter aftermath, she would lie pretending to herself as a child does. These imaginings always took the same form, and on this night at Paradise she began the old childish-womanly game again when she saw sleep would not come.
The pretence was that she was going to have a baby. In her heart of hearts she knew she wanted Killigrew to marry her, or rather to want to marry her. With all her knowledge of him she could not quite come to the belief that she could not make him happy if he were married to her…. Perhaps if she were going to have a baby, he would want to. He would not; but he would have done it as soon as he saw she really wanted it, though without seeing the necessity, which would not have existed in a world constructed on his plan. Still, she knew he would do it, given the right circumstances; also she knew he had the deep love for children derived from a Jewish strain in his family. With that baby he would come to a fuller love of her than ever before; its advent would surely give him what even she admitted he lacked.
She lay now, picturing it to herself and planning a cunningly-laid deceit by which she should appear a lovely and noble figure in his eyes. She would have a very "bad time," of course, or somehow the thing would lose significance, and she would ask, nay implore, the doctor to promise her, if he could only save either the child or herself, to let it be the child. And Joe would hear of it and know that it was because he wanted a child so much…. She might pretend to be delirious and murmur that he wanted the child so much more than he did her…. He would be in the room and hear her and she would pretend not to know it….