Poor Eustace! What irony! Years of seeking for the one woman who exteriorized his secret fixation, to find her only to learn that the shell had deluded him, that there was nothing within it for him. Worse. To train her, to wear down her defenses, to deliver her from her accumulated obliquities, for another man. What was the matter with life? Controlled it would seem, not by a Beneficent Power, but by what Poe had called the Imp of the Perverse. . . .
The only thing she hated to give up was Bladina’s pearls!
And the Brittany set. But no doubt she could buy that from Eustace. . . .
She told herself harshly that she was twisting and turning from that final probing, and after a moment of real terror, in which she felt an impulse to flee from the room, tearing off that whispering old gown as she ran, she set her teeth and went to the brink and peered down once more.
She was in love with Geoffrey Pelham. She said the words aloud to steady her nerves with their finality. Then shrugged her shoulders and settled back in her chair, although she kicked a stool across the room.
Well, what did it mean? What was she to do about it? He had been obsessing her conscious mind since the night at the Pleydens’, possibly her unconscious since they had sat together in this room. Now that she had hauled him out into the light he would probably obsess every waking moment and haunt her dreams.
She felt that no caged eagle could be more resentful than she at this moment. Her pride had been as abnormal as her existence. Her ego could hardly have been more extended if she had been a heroin addict. That old dream of herself, solitary on a solitary peak had been more than an escape-fulfillment; it had been a reveling of the ego in its complete independence. And there was no independence in the surrender of one’s ego to another, even in this latter-day pretense of fifty-fifty. Women were exactly the same fundamentally as they had always been. Their instinct was surrender—blind instinct of the race to survive.
But she hadn’t got as far as that yet! If loathing had been exorcised in that final explosion under that detestable novelist’s goading, and she had been ejected out of the fog into a dazzle of light—mercifully blinded for the moment to the fact of Geoffrey Pelham—she was conscious of no sexual discomfort. She had never discussed that subject with anyone, but modernists in fiction were remarkably frank, and while they deadened the imagination of the reader, they left little to be learned by mere experience. She knew all about it!
But although her blood traveled its accustomed gait, she knew that Geoffrey Pelham’s image was sunken deep in that unpicturesque pump of hers called heart, and probably forever. She was not the woman to be able to love twice. She recalled the definition of love he had given to Polly, and concluded it was more likely to be correct than anything heretofore advanced. Science was explaining one mystery after another, psychical as well as physical, and she for one liked to know what was the matter with her.
She analyzed her sensations toward this man who had torn her old theories about herself up by the roots. Eustace had once told her that analysis was fatal to love, but that was an old delusion that surprised her in a man uncommonly clear and precise of vision. She felt exactly the same whether she analyzed or not.