We Three

by Gouverneur Morris

I turned into the Aiken Club feeling a little lonely. How good, I thought, it would be to be met, even once, as Fulton is being met.

And now I must set down things that I did not know at this time, and only found out afterward. And other things that are only approximately true, things that wouldn't happen in my presence, but which I am very sure must have happened.

When Lucy drove off at such a reckless pace to get to the station before the train, I don't think it even occurred to her that during his absence her feelings for her husband had changed in any way. It was he, I think, who was the first to know that there was a change. He did not realize it at the station or on the way home. How could he with Jock and Hurry piled in his lap, and both talking two-forty, and Lucy at his side, trying to make herself heard and even understood? No man could. It must have been shortly after he got home, at that moment, indeed, when he was alone with her, and his arms went out to her with all the love and yearning accumulated at compound interest during absence. Habit, and the wish to hurt no one, must have carried her arms to tighten a little about him, and to lift her lips to him. Then I think she must have turned her head a little, so that it was only her cheek that he kissed. I imagine that until that time Fulton's love-making had always found the swiftest response, that with those two passion had always been as mutual and spontaneous as passion can be; and that now, perhaps the very first time, his fire met with that which it could not kindle into answering flame.

I do not think that he at once let her go. I think that first his arms that held her so close loosened (already the pressure had all gone out of hers). I think she was sorry they had to loosen, and glad that they had. Then his arms must have dropped to his sides. He did not at once turn away, but kept on looking at her, as she at him—he, hurt, he did not know why, but brimming with love and compassion and tenderness and a little desperate with the effort to understand and to make allowances for whatever might have to be understood. Her great blue eyes looked almost black for once, prayer upon prayer was in their depths, they were steady upon his and unfaltering. It was as if she was giving him every opportunity to look down through them and see what was in her soul.

It could not have been till many days later that a whole sequence of episodes which hurt and could not be understood forced him into speech. I think he must suddenly in a moment of trial, have come out with something like this:

"Why, Lucy, it sometimes seems as if you didn't love me any more."

When she didn't answer, it must have flashed through him like a streak of ice-cold lightning that perhaps she really didn't.

I am glad that it is only in imagination that I can hear his next question and her answer. There must have been a something in his voice from which the most callous-hearted would have wished to run, as from the deathbed of a little child.

"Don't you, Lucy?"

And how terribly it must have hurt her to answer that question! Considering what he had been to her and she to him, for how long a period of time neither had been able to see anything in this world beyond the other, and considering with even more weight than these things their own children for whom the feelings of neither could ever really change, I think that Lucy ought to have lied. I think she ought to have lied with all her might and main, lied as John Fulton would have lied if the situation had been reversed, and that thereafter, until his death or hers, she ought to have acted those lies, with unflagging fervor and patience. Tenderness for him she never lost. She might, upon that foundation, have built a saintly edifice of simulated love and passion.