The disturbance grew. It made me draw away from Roger, pressed close into my corner, as if no scrap or edge of my clothing must touch him. I was afraid that my voice would show it and determined that it mustn’t.
“I’m lonely sometimes. That rainy night when you came in unexpectedly I was.”
My voice wasn’t all right. I cleared my throat and pretended to look at the stars.
Roger said nothing, but the secret subways of emotion that connect the spirits of those who are in close communion, told me he, too, was moved. The air in the closed scented car did not seem enough for natural breathing. It was like a pressure, something that put your heart-beats out of tune, and made your lips open with a noiseless gasp. I stood it as long as I could and then words burst out of me. They came anyway, ridiculous words when I write them down:
“But I’ll never marry any of them. No matter what they are, or what Betty wants, or how many of them she has up to dinner.”
The pressure was lifted and I sank back trembling. It was as if I had been under water and come up again into the air. The spiritual telegraph told me that Roger felt as I did, and that suddenly he or I or both of us, had broken down a barrier. It was swept away and we were close together—closer than the night when we had held hands and forgotten where we were, closer than we’d ever been in all the years we’d known each other. It was not necessary to say anything. In our several corners we sat silent, understanding for the first time, I and the man I loved.
The sharp landscape slid by us, naked trees, spotted lines of light, stretches of lawn grizzled with frost, woodland depths with the shine of ice about the tree roots, and then the flash of glassy ponds.
We sat as still as if we were dead, as if our souls had come out of our bodies and were whispering. It was a wonderful moment of time, one of the unforgetable moments that dot the long material years. All that’s gone before and all that’s going to come dies away and there’s only the present—the beautiful exquisite present. We only have a few like that in our lives.
It lasted till the auto drew up at my door. We said good night and parted.
Up in my room I sat a long time by the fire thinking of the hundreds of women like myself, the disillusioned ones, in the dark dens of tenements and in the splendid homes near by. I tried to send them messages through the night, telling them we could rise out of the depths. I saw life as it really is, hills and valleys, patches of blackness and then light, but always with an unresting force flowing beneath, the immortal thing that urges and upholds and makes it all possible. I remembered words I used to work on bits of perforated board when I was a little girl, “God is Love.” I never understood what it meant, even when I stopped working it on perforated board and grew to the reasoning stage. To-night I knew—got at last what a happy child might understand—love in the heart was God with us, come back to us again.