“Don’t you want to stay here? I’ll go,” offered Grace brusquely later.
“No—no——” Horatia protested. “I’m the one to go. I really ought to go to stay with Maud’s children for a while anyhow. She and her husband want to go to New York for six weeks and they have been asking me to stay at their house while they are away. I didn’t promise but I will go.”
“Tonight?”
Horatia hesitated.
“No,” she answered bravely, “tomorrow.”
Suddenly Grace burst into tears.
It was the first time that reality had closely touched Horatia and for the first time she realized that in dealing with personal realities, theories have little value unless they have been tested by experience. She had never been one of those who sought after modern ideas for their own sake but she had accepted easily and as a matter of course all the talk which went with her time—talk which was lavish in its use of phrases about the rights of the individual, freedom of thought, antique conventionality and the new everything. She believed in no church and she laughed at Maud’s rigors as to what was and what wasn’t proper. In college she had often expressed an opinion strongly indignant that women should be required or expected to be more chaste than men and held the double standard in abhorrence. And yet she was horrified to discover that the man in this case did not excite her really. He was condemned but it was a passionless condemnation that she gave him. But with Grace her horror at finding that Grace had made use of this little apartment for a furtive love affair turned her sick and yet miserable lest her fastidiousness might be only cheapness. The saddest point in the little tragedy was that Horatia could not know that she was learning one of the deepest truths which she would ever learn—that through all intensive modernism and intensive conservatism runs a thread of instinct that is stronger than either—a fundamental morality which drives the most hidebound conservatives into most radical actions and the most dangerous radicals into the most conservative actions. The thread may be tangled, and never untangled by some people in either group but, unbroken, it runs through life and always will, through Bolshevism and monarchism. Always irrefutable the fact confronts us that life is bigger than politics or economic conditions or theories about either.
When Grace and Horatia said a restrained good night and went to their bedrooms Horatia threw off her clothes and jumped into bed.
“If this affair was a block away it wouldn’t bother me at all,” she said to herself determinedly. “I’ve decided to leave. Now I must go to sleep.”
It was easy to say and impossible to do—easy to whip her actions into conformity but not so easy to control her thought. She was shivering with unpleasant contacts and she found herself standing on the floor in the darkness, longing to dress and run away again. She tried to laugh, to be “sensible,” assuring herself that all she needed was sleep and rest. But there was no such thing as sleep. The darkness was not soft and quiet. It was full of thoughts and pictures which did not soothe but tortured her. She had always let her last thought be of her lover. Now she wanted to forget about all men—even Jim. Grace had said—and so her mind raced on through the darkness and morning came again.