“I’m one of them,” Katherine said. “You forget that. We may be slow and stupid and unimaginative, as you say, but we are fond of one another. You’re impatient, Phil. I tell you to wait ... wait!”
“Wait!” He looked out to sea, where the bar of blue was now sown with white dancing feathers. “I can’t wait ... there’s something else. There’s Anna.”
Katherine nodded her head as though she had known that this would come.
“Ever since that day at Rafiel she’s been between us; you’ve known it as well as I. It hasn’t been quite as I’d expected. I thought perhaps that you’d be shocked. You weren’t shocked. I thought that I’d be confused myself. I haven’t been confused. You’ve wanted to know about her—anything I could tell you. You’ve simply been curious, as you might, about anyone I’d known before I met you—but the business has been this, that the more you’ve asked the more I’ve thought about her. The more she’s come back to me. It hasn’t been that I’ve wanted her, even that I’ve thought tenderly about her, only that your curiosity has revived all that life as though I were back in it all again. I’ve remembered so much that I’d forgotten.”
Katherine took his hand and came close to him. “Yes. I knew that it was like that,” she said. “I knew that it was foolish of me to ask questions, to make you talk about her, and I couldn’t help myself—I knew that it was foolish, and I couldn’t help myself. And the strange thing is that I don’t suppose I’ve ever wondered about anyone whom I didn’t know in my life before. I’ve never been able to imagine people unless I had pictures or something to help me. But now—I seem to see her as though I’d known her all my days. And I’m not jealous—no, truly, truly, I’m not jealous. And yet I don’t like her—I grudge—I grudge—”
She suddenly hid her face in the sleeve of his coat and her hand went up to his cheek.
Philip, holding her with his arm as though he were protecting her, went on: “And you’ve felt that I didn’t want you to ask me questions about her—and you’ve been silent. I knew that you were silent because you were afraid of my restlessness, and that has made restraint between us. You wouldn’t speak and I wouldn’t speak, and we’ve both been thinking of Anna until we’ve created her between us. It’s so like her—so like her. Why,” he went on, “you’ll think this absurd perhaps—but I don’t know—it’s not so absurd when you’ve lived with her. I wrote and told her about us—about our engagement. I’ve never had an answer from her, but I can fancy her saying to herself: ‘It would be amusing to bring him back to me—not that I want him. I should be bored to death if I had to live with him again—but just for the humour of it. He was always so weak. He’ll come if I ask him.’
“I can imagine her saying that, and then I can imagine her just projecting herself over here into the middle of us—simply for the fun of it. I can see her laughing to herself in the way she used to when she saw people behaving in what she thought was a childish fashion. So now she’ll think us all childish, and she’ll simply come here, her laughing, mocking spirit—and do her best to break us all up.”
“You’re afraid of her!” Katherine cried, as though she were challenging him.
“Yes. I’m afraid of her,” he acknowledged.