She shrugged her shoulders ... and without further speech, re-descended the ladder, and went swiftly back to her room.
Her room!
On an impulse of dread she slammed the door, shot the bolt, and then, breathlessly, back against the panels, looked round at what was to her almost tangible solitude. Queer, how all these years she and Gareth had dragged on in that hateful—that indecent intimacy of every inch of space shared, because neither had dared shatter aloud the forced assumption that these conditions were as both wished them. And now, by the merest accident—Trixie Worley as a bungling ludicrous fairy god-mother—they were given their holiday. Their first holiday since Alpenruh. Then, chance had divinely thrown them together; now, chance as divinely held them apart. Her maidenhood was restored to her.... The sensation that at any moment another had the right to walk in, touch her possessions, watch her actions—how had she borne the sixteen years' torment? There burnt within her nature a fierce white-hot virginity, an utter incapacity to share, which all her married life had been powerless to wear away. From the hour when convention and the cramped limits of Pacific Villa had obliged her to watch Gareth struggle with his shirt, love had slipped from her; gave place to an irritation from which there was to be no respite. She had heard him breathing at night——
Oh, the wonder of the holiday nights to come, when she would lie alone....
Luxuriously savouring each unwitnessed movement, she began to undress.
She was feeling rather vividly well. Summer heat had always a stimulating effect upon her; the ghost of her Red Indian grandmother saw to that. A warm colour flushed her haggard face. She crossed to the window, treading lightly as her moccasined ancestors might have done. The air smelt hot and ripe; a faint odour of musk was astir. This was August—she need not begin to think of winter yet. The underlying dread crouched, biding its time. She was forty-three—she need not begin to think of middle-age yet ... not for a moment yet. She was now very much in the same mood as had sent the girl of twenty-seven with Gareth to Alpenruh. That had been the first panic. This—the last?
Squatting on the window-seat, lank strands of hair clinging to shoulders and waist, eyes straining towards the dark land-whipped pines surrounding the courtyard, she sent forth an imperious summons to youth and romance. Kathleen called it romance. She told herself that because she shrank from contact with Gareth, so all her longings must naturally be spiritual. She told herself that her imagination was starved.... Kathleen was forty-three; and the summer heat fevered her blood and flushed her thin face, as with naked breasts she leant from the window of her virginal bedroom.
In the shadowy attic, candle-lit, Gareth wrote the first chapter of "The Round Adventure."