It had been hidden in all her happiness. Her happiness was it. Maurice
Jourdain.
When she said "Maurice Jourdain" she could feel her voice throb in her body like the string of a violin. When she thought of Maurice Jourdain the stir renewed itself in a vague, exquisite vibration. The edges of her mouth curled out with faint throbbing movements, suddenly sensitive, like eyelids, like finger-tips.
Odd memories darted out at her. The plantation at Ilford. Jimmy's mouth crushing her face. Jimmy's arms crushing her chest. A scarlet frock. The white bridge-rail by the ford. Bertha Mitchison, saying things, things you wouldn't think of if you could help it. But she was mainly aware of a surpassing tenderness and a desire to immolate herself, in some remarkable and noble fashion, for Maurice Jourdain. If only she could see him, for ten minutes, five minutes, and tell him that she hadn't forgotten him. He belonged to her real life. Her self had a secret place where people couldn't get at it, where its real life went on. He was the only person she could think of as having a real life at all like her own. She had thought of him as mixed up for ever with her real life, so that whether she saw him or not, whether she remembered him or not, he would be there. He was in the songs she made, he was in the Sonata Appassionata; he was in the solemn beauty of Karva under the moon. In the Critique of Pure Reason she caught the bright passing of his mind.
Perhaps she had forgotten a little what he looked like. Smoky black eyes. Tired eyelids. A crystal mind, shining and flashing. A mind like a big room, filled from end to end with light. Maurice Jourdain.
V.
"I don't think I should have known you, Mary."
Maurice Jourdain had come. In the end Uncle Victor had let him. He was sitting there, all by himself, on the sofa in the middle of the room.
It was his third evening. She had thought it was going to pass exactly like the other two, and then her mother had got up, with an incredible suddenness, and left them.
Through the open window you could hear the rain falling in the garden; you could see the garden grey and wet with rain.
She sat on the edge of the fender, and without looking up she knew that he was watching her from under half-shut eyelids.