Paul replied absently: they had not decided. Probably they would not go down till after the holidays.
What an attractive plan? What an ideal family Christmas they would have all together in the country! Christine had not been up all summer, had she? Here Moya came to her husband's relief, through a wife's dual consciousness in company, and covered his want of spirits with a flood of foolish chatter.
The smiling way in which women the most sincere can posture and prance on the brink of dissimulation was particularly sickening to Paul at this time. Why need they put themselves in situations where it was required? The situations were of his mother's creation. He imagined she must suffer, but had little sympathy with that side of her martyrdom. Moya seemed a trifle feverish in her acceptance of these affairs of which she was naturally the life and centre. A day of entertaining often faded into an evening of subtle sadness.
Paul would take her out into the moonlight of that deep inland country. The trees were dark with leaves and brooded close above them; old water-fences and milldams cast inky shadows on the still, shallow ponds clasped in wooded hills. No region could have offered a more striking contrast to the empty plains. Moya felt shut in with old histories. The very ground was but moulding sand in which generations of human lives had been poured, and the sand swept over to be reshaped for them.
“We are not living our own life yet,” Paul would say; not adding, “We are protecting her.” Here was the beginning of punishment helplessly meted out to this proud woman whose sole desire was towards her children—to give, and not to receive.
“But this is our Garden?” Moya would muse. “We are as nearly two alone as any two could be.”
“If you include the Snake. We can't leave out the Snake, you know.”
“Snake or Seraph—I don't believe I know the difference. Paul, I cannot have you thinking things.”
“I?—what do I think?”
“You are thinking it is bad for me to be so much with her. You, as a man and a husband, resent what she, as a woman and a wife, has dared to do. And I, as another woman and wife, I say she could do nothing else and be true. For, don't you see? She never loved him. The wifehood in her has never been reached. She was a girl, then a mother, then a widow. How could she”—