Either was the other’s mine.
Property was thus appalled
That the self was not the same;
Single nature’s double name
Neither two nor one was called.
[I
MEETING]
He trieth the sea after many shipwrecks; and beats still on that door which he never saw opened.
WHEN Ann and Kilner left René, he was filled with anger against them, first of all, fleetingly, with the petulance of a sick man at being left alone without his having expressed a wish for it, and then at their treating him as a sick man when he was nothing of the kind, but only passing through a crisis in which not even sympathy could help him much. Kilner was so cocksure just because he had a peculiar delight in putting paint on canvas; and Ann—poor dear little Ann!—she loved to have things and people at her mercy and to keep them there. And she could make no attempt to understand them, because if she did so, that would be to believe in them and let them be free to work out their own destiny. He knew how little freedom she would even grant himself, and his mind, spurred by revolt into high activity, went straight to its mark, the place where freedom most clearly promised—absurdly, the door through which he had seen Rachel Bentley pass. That led to his clearest and most beautiful memory, the days in Scotland, the happy boyhood when delight had grown from year to year, to flower at last in the coming of Cathleen. Very vivid was his recollection of their first meeting in his aunt’s house: himself very coltish and shy, she charmingly self-conscious and alert. It was the first year the Bentleys had taken the big house, and she had come round by the road. His aunt had asked him to show Cathleen the short cut through the woods. She chattered until his shyness overcame him, and then they walked in a miserable silence. He comforted himself by regarding her as a little girl, which to his young prudishness made his involuntary adoration of her beauty legitimate. He could never take his eyes off her, and she began to amuse herself with him and try her coquetries upon his oversensitiveness. He suffered terribly. She was caught in her own wiles, and she too suffered. It was a relief to both when, the first year, they parted.
The next year she was not so lovely, and had lost or disguised her wildness. It was not long before he discovered that he could rouse it in her. Then began their meetings in the woods.