It was impossible to be angry with Sabine. She was so calm, so obviously honest; it was impossible not to respect that incredible passion for the truth.
“I know what it is ... I know,” murmured Sabine thoughtfully.
“I think at times that I could give him up,” and Ellen snapped her fingers, “like that ... quickly, without a qualm, without so much as a backward look, and then something reaches out and takes possession of me, and in the next moment I know it is impossible. Once you are entangled, it is not easy to be free.” She threw her cigarette half-smoked into the mouth of the fireplace, a monstrous, ornate affair out of all proportion to the room. “My God!” she added with a quick passion. “What is it that he does to us?... To women like you and me, who are intelligent women, independent ... not fools? What is it he does to most women? I have seen them in the hotel at Tunis looking at him. I have seen that look come into his eyes....”
Sabine put down her teacup, leaned forward and said, “It is an animal thing ... what he does to us. If we are to be honest, it is that. You see, women like you and me never think of that.... We take it for granted there is no such thing.... But there is, just the same. It is in all of us who are women at all. The power he possesses is the power of most men multiplied many times.... Latin women, who are more honest, can deal with it.... French women ... some French women ... are cynical and rational.... And they are better protected than ourselves, because they know what they are about.... A woman like old Thérèse could never have been hurt by him. They are protected from suffering, at least a certain kind of suffering. They would not be caught as we have been ... stupidly.”
French women! (thought Ellen). There was Madame Nozières. Had it protected her? Still, her suffering had not been of this sort. It was a different thing. What Sabine said about women like themselves was true. Somehow Sabine had cleared the air. She (Ellen) had always thought of him thus in the moments when her head had been quite clear ... as an animal, a handsome, docile cat. It explained too why she had always had a small, secret terror of him; why she had always been shocked by the fierceness of his love. When he had come to her in the Babylon Arms the distaste had not been so strong; but he had been more fresh then, less conscious of what he was. When he returned to her, it was with the freshness gone, with the romance worn away so that only the other thing showed through, naked yet fascinating to a woman who (she was honest with herself) ... a woman who had never known anything but the timid, pitiful love of Clarence.
And there was one thing she could not endure—that she, Ellen Tolliver, the part of her which she had guarded so jealously, should ever be destroyed by losing control over her own body.
And again she kept seeing him, dark and secret, this time as he sat across from her at the table in the small white room overlooking the Mediterranean, with the old sense of conflict rising sharply between them. She was conscious of watching him, as he watched her, of wondering how long she could go on thus, imprisoned. She saw again the gray eyes watching her, stubbornly, as if she were a proud animal which they had set themselves to subdue. It was all confused and hateful because one could never know what he was thinking—whether behind those opaque gray eyes there were thoughts of love or of hatred. There were no intimacies of feeling, or even of taste. He was not a husband such as Fergus would have been, eager and naïvely honest, not stolid and dependable like Robert.... He was not like any man she could think of. He was an alien ... an outsider. She remembered the taunt Rebecca had flung at her, “He is marrying you only to break your will ... to destroy you. He has waited all these years.”
But he had not done it! He had not done it! There were times when she hated only and felt powerful and strong, but times too when her strength oozed from her, leaving her only a poor, silly, feminine creature eager to please and fascinate him—a contemptible creature like those women in the corridors of the hotel in Tunis. No, she would not be destroyed thus!
“Sometimes,” observed Sabine, in her cold, measured voice, “I think that men and women are born to be enemies, that even in the happiest of loves there is an element of conflict. One must possess and the other be possessed. There is no helping it. It seems to me that we are always fighting, fighting, to save the part of us which is ourself.”
She laughed. “Why, we’re doing it now, you know ... the two of us. Richard, you may say, is the embodiment of all that part of men which we can never bring ourselves to accept ... women like you and me.”