"I'm going. You eat it. I'm ... I don't want...."
Patricia stood there, her eyes stern but loving; reproachful and contemptuous. There was still a moment; and it passed. She turned swiftly, and left Harry standing by the table. He called once; but his fear of attracting attention in a public place held him there. It was the one thing which would have restrained him. Sick at heart, but with her head erect, Patricia walked quickly out of the restaurant and into the street. She felt that her heart was breaking.
CHAPTER NINE: MISCHIEF
i
For two days Patricia kept within doors. She was broken and weary. For a time it was as though she had lost all the pride which had sustained her at the parting with Harry. She longed to see him, longed to beg for anything at all at his hands; and was restrained only by some timid delicacy, some fear, some paralysis of the will. The days were spent in sitting in her little front room, staring apathetically before her, or without seeing them at the fire and the murky sky. The nights were even more torturing, for if Patricia slept at all it was to dream hideously; while her wakeful tossings were almost unendurable. Harry, of course, came to the house; but Lucy was staunch, and he had been sent away with elaborate lies. Never until this moment had Patricia understood how much warmth and generosity lay behind the pink smudge of Lucy's face. She had been forced into half-confidence; and Lucy had understood the whole. At first, shrewdly, she had taken a consoling view. "Expect it'll come right," she had said, out of a deep knowledge of feminine psychology. "You feel queer now. You're all of a twitter. Then you'll want 'im, and go out and meet 'im somewhere on the sly. And—" But she had very quickly discovered that the break was serious. "Ah!" she had said. "All for the best, you and 'im bein' so fair, with blue eyes and all. I expect the babies would have been little niggers." She had sworn, refusing Harry's tips, that Patricia had gone into the country, leaving no address. Her pink face had glowed with the most righteous honesty. A letter had followed, a long letter full of explanations; and Patricia, although it had deeply moved her, had left it without acknowledgment. A further letter, asking for at least an interview, had been similarly ignored.
She was quite at a loss. Harry had meant so much to her, both in fact and in her happy dreams of love, that she was miserable without him. She knew that her silence was inexcusable; that it would make him think her merely the little suburban prig of his supposition. But the facts which were turned over and over in her mind—the sudden intuitions which had been the occasion of the crisis, his own attitude to marriage, the illuminations provided by Amy—were devastating. Patricia could not deal with them. They were too much for her. At times she tried to reason with herself. Fear sprang to her heart, and reduced her to panic. She made an attempt even to analyse her own sense of shock, to say that it was stupid, that it was squeamish, old-fashioned, babyish. Useless! The truth was more bitter than any merely cowardly flinching. Whatever might be her feeling in the future, she was almost hysterically determined at this moment. Her mind leapt on to blacker thoughts of Harry, and recoiled from them. All the curious exaggerations of wickedness which will arise in the most virgin minds tempted her own. They were repulsed. She was not yet sophisticated enough to be ready to believe the alarmist suggestions of her imagination.
At last she wrote to Harry:
"Dear Harry: I was silly to leave you under a wrong impression. I had been thinking I was in love with you; and then I had suddenly realised that I couldn't marry you. I wasn't shocked at the thought that you only wanted to have an affair with me. I had just felt that you weren't any use to me, and that I wasn't any use to you. I am very fond of you. I have never been so attracted to any one. It isn't enough for me. I want lots more. Sorry, Harry. Patricia."