Golda smiled at him.
“You had better go and see,” she said.
He darted from the room and across to his studio panting with excitement, persuading himself at every step that she was there, waiting for him, perhaps hiding to tease him, for she was a terrible tease.
By the time he reached his studio he was so convinced that she was there that he hardly dared open the door. He pushed it open very gently and peered in. The room was empty, but he felt sure that she was there. He peeped round the corner into his bedroom. She was not there. He had to believe it, and came dejectedly back into the studio.
On his painting-table were autumn flowers daintily arranged in the old jug he used for a vase. He buried his face in them. She was there! She was there in the sweetness and fragrance of the flowers.
[VII
CONFLICT]
MORRISON had fought bravely through her storms and difficulties. She frightened Clowes with the violence of her efforts and the terrible strain she inflicted on her vitality. There were times when she thought the simplest way would be to cut adrift from all her old associations and to throw in her lot with Mendel, to give him his desire and so save him from the terrible life he was leading. But that was too drastic, too simple. She could only have done it on a great impulse, but always her deepest feelings shrank from it, and without her deepest feelings she could not go to him, for they were engaged most of all. . . . She felt cramped and confined, as though her love were a cord wound round and round her limbs, and she could not, she would not go to him bound. He must release her; she must compel him to release her. If it took half her lifetime she would so compel him. Her will was concentrated upon him. She would not have their love droop from the high sympathy it had known, nor should it be torn from it by his savage strength and the adorable violence of his passion. Neither, on the other hand, would she turn back from him. That would be to deny her freedom which she had bought so dearly. She had thought her freedom would give her the easy joy of flowers and clouds and birds, and she still believed in that easy joy, but it lay beyond the tangled web of this love for the strange, dark, faunlike creature whom she had found in the woods. If she turned back, if she denied the urgent emotions that drove her on, she had nothing to turn to but the old captivity, the life where all difficulties were arranged for, where all roads led to marriage, where men could only talk to women in a half-patronizing, half-flirtatious way that led to a ridiculous meeting of the senses, then to an engagement, and so to church. To that she would never, never return. She had fought her way out of it. She had learned to live by herself, within herself, to wrestle with her thoughts and emotions and to get them into shape. (It had been at a great cost to her external tidiness and orderliness, but that too she hoped to tackle in time.) She had won all this, and she had found a glorious outlet in work. So far as she had gone she had been successful, and she was ambitious, terribly ambitious, to show that a woman could do good work.
And then there was the dark side of Mendel’s life—Logan, Oliver, Jessie Petrie. At the thought of it she shuddered, but her honesty made her confess that it made no difference to her central feeling. It had shocked her, outraged her, roused her to a fury of jealousy, but that she would not have. She fought it down inch by inch until she had it so well in control that, whenever it reared its head, she could crush it down.
Many a tear had it cost her, but she insisted that she must understand.