"I shall never trouble you, Eunice."
He came close to her then to open the door, seeing that she was to leave him, and he saw too that she had suffered, was at the very ebb and stony bottom of emotion as she hung for the moment in the doorway searching for some winged shaft of separation that should cut her off from the remotest implication of the situation. She found at last the barbedest. All the succeeding time after he closed the door on her was marked for Peter, not by the ticked moments but by successive waves of anguish as that poisoned arrow worked its way to his secret places.
"It isn't as if I had ever loved you; I owe it to Mr. Henderson to remind you that I never said I did.... You know I never liked to have you kiss me."
He had in the months that succeeded to that last sight of Eunice Goodward, moments of unbearably wanting to go to her to try for a little to ease his torment in a more tender recognition of it—days when he would have taken from her, gratefully even if she had fooled him and he had seen her do it, whatever would have saved him from the certainty that never even in those first exquisite moments had she been his. The sharp edge of her young sufficiency had lopped off the right limb of his manhood. Never, even in his dreams, if life had allowed him to dream again, should he be able to see himself in any other guise than the meagre, austere front which his obligation to his mother and Ellen had obliged him to present to destiny. She had beggared him of all those aptitudes for passionate relations, by the faith in which he had kept himself inwardly alive. The capacity for loving died in him with the knowledge of not being able to be loved.
Out of the anæsthesia of exhaustion from which Italy had revived him, it rolled back upon him that by just the walled imperviousness that shut Eunice Goodward from the appreciation of his passion, he was prevented now from Savilla Dassonville.
XI
It was odd, then, having come to this conclusion in the middle of the night, that when he joined the ladies in the morning he should have experienced a sinking pang in not being able any longer to be sure what Miss Dassonville thought of him. There was in her manner, as she thanked him for the flowers, nothing to ruffle the surface of the bright, impersonal companionship which she had afforded him for weeks past.
The occasion which brought them together was an agreement entered into some days earlier, to go and look at palaces, and as they turned past the Saluti to the Grand Canal, he found himself wondering if there had not been a touch of fatuity in his reading of the incident of the morning before. He had gone so far in the night as to think even of leaving Venice, and saw himself now forlornly wishing for some renewal of yesterday's mood to excuse him from the caddishness that such a flight implied.
It came out a little later, perhaps, when after traversing many high and resounding marble halls, with a great many rooms opening into one another in a way that suggested rather the avoidance of privacy than its security, they found themselves in one of those gardens of shut delight of which the exteriors of Venetian houses give so little intimation.