Azalea believed that love could exist between a man and a woman without emotional gratification and without expression save in the terms of friendship. She believed that it can be fed freely, by the mind and by the spirit, just as the body can be fed sanely without the bizarre concoctions demanded by self-encouraged neurasthenics. The secret lies in a woman’s power, and wish, to keep the association free from the tempering of passion. It is not enough to control it, argued Azalea. It must never be aroused. And this is rare, but not impossible.
She was not a vain woman. There was no conceit in her, and illusions had long since flown on the wings of dreams that were unfulfilled. She knew that she was plain, unlovely, unmagnetic; that never since adolescence had she awakened the readily distinguishable expression in man’s eyes that proclaims his discovery of the femaleness in his companion. But it was because she hadn’t tried!
According to her theory, the physical envelope matters comparatively little. The mysterious force that is called attraction, magnetism, passion, what you will, exists in plain and beautiful alike, and can be projected at will. Therefore, she possessed the female’s instinctual power to project this force—this beam that is like a shaft of light, and blinds the man upon whom it is thrown. He beholds the woman in a flame of radiance, unmindful of her lack of pulchritude. And not only is his physical sight impaired, but his mental eye loses its clarity of vision, and he invests this uncompanionable female with every quality he thinks desirable. He wants her. He starves for her. He will not be denied. And after marrying her, what happens?
The woman, having acquired the man upon whom she has fixed her choice, grows careless, indifferent, lazy. She no longer lights the shaft that dazzled him; she no longer projects it in his direction. He blinks, looks, and rubs his eyes; half the time, he doesn’t understand . . . Where is the woman he loved and married? Who is this creature, this unattractive stranger who pushes herself into his life, and tries to dominate, absorb it? There has been some hideous mistake . . . Steeped in the delusion that man is the determining factor in the mockery of emotional marriage, he takes the blame upon himself, persuaded that the fault is his. At first, he tries to hide his disenchantment. He says nothing . . . He determines to do nothing . . . just go on . . . They both go on . . . spiritually too far apart, physically too close together . . . bound by Church and State, and accustoming themselves to the functioning of two persons who live in that abominable intimacy—ironically termed the bonds of Holy Wedlock!
Azalea believed that the bond of wedlock could only be holy when it is not artificially constructed by predative females in search of economic ease, with a possible thrill or two, to boot. She agreed with the cynicism that marriage is man’s after-thought and woman’s first intention. She further believed that by continuing the rigid control of herself—control that neutralised and de-natured her—she and Dilling could maintain a relationship that not only was free from irregularity, but embarrassment.
Mingling with the stream of Civil Servants that flowed in and out of the Museum, Azalea’s mind was still concerned with the relationships between men and women, married and single. She thought of her sisters with something very like disgust; of Lady Elton, Eva Leeds, Mrs. Pratt, Mrs. Blaine, Mrs. Hudson, Mme. Valleau . . . what real comradeship did they offer their husbands? Swift’s words came to her as being especially applicable. “There would be fewer unhappy marriages in the world,” he said, “if women thought less of making nets, and more of making cages.”
She had never tried to make a net, not even for Raymond Dilling. She loved him too deeply to trap—to ensnare him. And if she longed to make a cage for him, it was as a means of protection, safety, refuge; not the terrible gilt-barred thing in which he would feel a sense of shame at his imprisonment.
She could hear him pacing about his little room, muttering fragmentary sentences now and then. The sound disturbed her. He was not, as a rule, stimulated to intensive thought by prowling. Was she already responsible for disorganising the methodical workings of his mind?
Poise, control, fell from her. She turned the pages of Hansard feverishly and without intelligence. She longed to go to him, to take his frail body in her arms, to soothe him in her self-effacing renunciatory way. She longed to whisper to him, “There, my dear, you needn’t dread me. You needn’t be afraid.”
Instead, she sat at her desk and fluttered the leaves of Hansard, and suffered the anguish of one who cannot take on the suffering of that beloved other . . .