‘We shall have reached a consummation,’ interpolated her husband, ‘much, as Shakespeare says, to be desired.’
‘The law of periodicity, Mr. Redshawe,’ Mrs. Bunnard assured him, ‘is perfectly obvious and understandable. Night and day, life and death, sleeping and waking—all these simple alternations are but manifestations of a universal rhythm.’
Not to be outdone, ‘The systole and diastole,’ cried Mr. Bunnard, deftly inserting a smile and a phrase into the manifest gap, ‘the systole and diastole of the Cosmic Heart.’
Desperately, like a goaded animal, ‘But what,’ asked Redshawe, ‘has all this God-throb....’
A surprising ripple of laughter arrested his question and drew his eyes back to Rosemary. Sheila came generously to the rescue and distracted to herself the enemy’s fire. In a little while Mrs. Bunnard withdrew to her bedroom with the announced intention of meditating; and the battle raged less furiously between the two remaining elders: so healingly less that Redshawe had a beatific sense of being alone in the universe with his divinity.
He plunged deeply into the cool waters of her elusive beauty, and they talked eagerly, yet with harmonious pauses ... until he chanced to see that on the third finger of her left hand she wore a plain gold ring.
Too desperately stricken to pay another moment’s homage to his ideal English reticence, he in effect ran like a hurt child to Rosemary’s mother by contriving an early opportunity of solitary speech with her. He the more readily exposed his wound to Sheila because he now perceived what until the shattering to bits of his fool’s paradise had been beyond his vision: that Sheila too was suffering.
‘She’s married!’ he protested to her.
‘Rosemary?’ she wearily answered him.