PART II
I
That was long ago. We were young then. What a haunting annoying phrase. One meets it everywhere, in books, on people’s lips, or unspoken in their eyes. The other day in the Grey House, sitting opposite Jane in the shabby little parlour, there it was again. She spoke it, but not wistfully, more with relief than regret. I stayed ten days in St. Mary’s Plains and during those days she told me the rest of the story, bit by bit, till she came to the end—I put it down now as she told it—what follows are her own words as I remember them.
* * * * * * * *
That was the end of my youth and the beginning of life. Until then I had been made use of, but after that I acted and I became responsible for myself.
Fifteen years ago, we sat till morning waiting for Philibert. I no longer remember what I felt. Have you tried to recall sensations of pain, and by thinking very closely about all the little circumstances surrounding them, to experience again the stab or the ache? One can’t. I can’t feel again that agony. I suppose it was agony. You remember it better than I do, for you saw it. One remembers things one has seen and things one did, but not what went on inside one’s own dark, impenetrable body and soul, invisibly. I remember what I did at that time and what I said and what other people said and looked. I remember your face, and Jinny’s fear of me, and her fretting for her father, and Fan’s coming and saying that I looked like a mad woman, and from these facts I deduce the other fact that I was suffering, but I have forgotten the feeling. That is very strange when you come to think of it, for how, then, can I know that it was so? I don’t know. It is all merely conjecture. One would have thought, from the way I behaved and the way it changed everything that my emotion of that time was tremendous; was immensely important. But it wasn’t. It had no substance. It didn’t stand the test of time. It has vanished completely. Other things have lasted.