Only one line, one line, would have been sufficient. It needed only the reassurance that she thought of him, that she still cared ... such a short letter would have given him all the comfort he needed.
The need for some sign came as much from his impatience with the whole situation as from his love for Rachel, but this, because he always saw himself as a fine coloured centre of some passionate crisis, he naturally did not perceive. His whole idea of Rachel was, as the days passed, increasingly a picture that was far enough from reality—On the one side Rachel—on the other side his restoration to his family ... now as he waited it seemed to him that he was in danger of losing both the one thing and the other.
There was nothing that so speedily drove Breton to frenzy as enforced inaction.
After all, they had been together so little—
Breton was cursed with his imagination. All his instability of character came from his imagination. He looked ahead and saw such wonderful events, he knew why people did this or that; he could see so clearly what would happen did he act in such and such a way.... He traced future action through many hazardous windings into a safe, fair Haven, and for the sake of the Haven embarked on the preliminary dangers—discovered, of course, too late, that the Haven was a dream. He saw Rachel now, sitting alone, thinking of him, loving him, forcing herself to be fair to her blockhead of a husband, feeling at last that she could endure it no longer, and so writing! or he saw her falling in love with that same blockhead, forgetting everyone and everything else.
In all of this his grandmother played her part. He was aware that behind all the attraction that he had had for Rachel was the consciousness that he was a rebel against the Duchess—they were rebels together—that, he knew, was the way that she thought of it.
He was aware, however, that he was a rebel only because he was forced to be one. Let his grandmother hold out her old arms to him and into them he would run! He would be restored to the family—horribly he wanted it! The spirit with which he had returned to England was one of hot vengeance that would, indeed, have suited the finest of Rachel's moods, but that spirit had, he knew, subtly changed—Here then, with regard to Rachel, he felt a traitor—Would she come to him, why then he would do anything for her even to pulling the Duchess's nose—but if she would not come to him, why then he would rather that the Beaminsters should take him to themselves and make him one of them.
But he felt—although he had no tangible arguments to support his feeling—that the old lady was "round the corner"—"she knows, you bet, all about things—what I'd give for just one talk with her.... I believe we'd be friends——"
His weakness of character came, as he himself knew, from his inability to allow life to stay at a good safe dull level. "To-day's dull—Something must happen before evening; I must make it happen," and then he would go and do something foolish—
London excited him—the lighted shops, the smell of food and flowers and women and leather and tobacco, the sky—signs flashing from space to space, the carts and omnibuses, the shouts and cries and sudden silences, the confused life of the place so that you could never say, "This is London," but could only, in retrospect say, "Ah, that must have been London," and still know that you had failed to grasp its secret.