She had supper ready for them, the lamp and the fire lit, the curtains drawn in the cozy kitchen. After they had eaten, they sat with cigarettes and coffee and peppermints round the fire.
Lotta said:
“I knew you would find what you wanted here. I think all lovers should bring their love to the earth and let the wind know that it is there. How can you love in streets and houses? They drive the sweetness out of it and keep it unnaturally excited. I have seen so much of that. Women especially are so house-conscious. They hate everything in love which threatens their pride of possession and position. They live so jealously that they want jealousy even in their love——”
“Thank you,” said René.
“For what?”
“For being so frank. I never was in a house before where there was no oppression in the atmosphere.”
“The house is so much happier since I came to it. It was occupied before by an old woman who never set foot outside the door for thirty years. We talk abusively about life in London, but life in villages is even more sordid. Country people live even more meanly and graspingly than townsfolk. There is more stagnation. They are all inbred. The people here are all married to cousins, and they are queer in the head and abnormal. Personally, I think the great towns grew out of the necessity for breaking all that up. English life was far too like a novel by Emily Brontë. It had to be broken up and readjusted. It was much more that than the desire for money. You are both such children that you have hardly had time to realize the kind of life in which you were brought up. You have both shaken free of it with the violence that makes one so hopeful of the younger generation. When you are as old as I am, you will be able to realize far more than I have done. The readjustment will be more nearly completed. The reaction from the evils of industrial life will be even more violent than the reaction from those of agrarian life. You will know how rare love is, and you will rejoice that it was given to you to feel it, even though, as it must not, it were to end to-night.” She turned to René and smiled at him with her soft eyes. “Cathleen has told me.”
“Yes,” he said. “I seem to have floundered into being forced to live my own life in my own way.”
“Cathleen too. You can only do it together. Neither of you could put up with a mate who desired less and regarded every emotion as a bond instead of a liberation. Love is the release of the spirit or it is not love.”