It was October, five months after Anne's birthday. She was not to know again the mood which determined her complete surrender. Supreme moods can never be recaptured or repeated. The passion that inspires them is unique, self-sacrificial, immortal only through fruition; doomed to pass and perish in its exaltation. She would know tenderness, but never just that tenderness; gladness, but never that gladness; peace, but never the peace that possessed her in the woods at Westleydale.
The new soul in her moved steadily, to a rhythm which lacked the diviner thrill of the impulse which had given it birth. It was but seldom that the moment revived in memory. If Anne had accounted to herself for that day, she would have said that they had taken the nine-fifty train to Westleydale, that they had had a nice luncheon, that the weather was exceptionally fine, and that well, yes, certainly, that day had been the beginning of their entirely satisfactory relations. Anne's mind had a tendency to lapse into the commonplace when not greatly stirred. Happily for her, she had a refuge from it in her communion with the Unseen.
Only at times was she conscious of a certain foiled expectancy. For the greater while it seemed to her that she had attained an indestructible spiritual content.
She conceived a profound affection for her home. The house in Prior Street became the centre of her earthward thoughts, and she seldom left it for very long. Her health remained magnificent; her nature being adapted to an undisturbed routine, appeased by the well-ordered, even passage of her days.
She had made a household religion for herself, and would have suffered in departing from it. To be always down before her husband for eight-o'clock breakfast; to sit with Edith from twelve till luncheon time, and in the early afternoon; to spend her evenings with her husband, reading aloud or talking, or sitting silent when silence soothed him; these things had become more sacred and imperative than her attendance at St. Saviour's. The hours of even-song struck for her no more.
For, above all, she had made a point of always being at home in time for Majendie's return from his office. At five o'clock she was ready for him, beside her tea-table, irreproachably dressed. Her friends complained that they had lost sight of her. Regularly at a quarter to five she would forsake the drawing-rooms of Thurston Square. However absorbing Mrs. Eliott's conversation, towards the quarter, the tender abstraction of Anne's manner showed plainly that her spirit had surrendered to another charm. Mrs. Eliott, in letting her go, had the air of a person serenely sane, indulgent to a persistent and punctual obsession. Anne divided her friends into those who understood and those who didn't. Fanny Eliott would never understand. But little Mrs. Gardner, through the immortality of her bridal spirit, understood completely. And for Anne Mrs. Gardner's understanding of her amounted to an understanding of her husband. Anne's heart went out to Mrs. Gardner.
Not that she saw much of her, either. She had grown impatient of interests that lay outside her home. Once she had decided to give herself up to her husband, other people's claims appeared as an impertinence beside that perfection of possession.
She was less vividly aware of her own perfect possession of him. Majendie was hardly aware of it himself. His happiness was so profound that he had not yet measured it. He, too, had slipped into the same imperturbable routine. It was seldom that he kept her waiting past five o'clock. He hated the people who made business appointments with him for that hour. His old associates saw little of him, and his club knew him no more. He preferred Anne's society to that of any other person. They had no more fear of each other. He saw that she was beginning to forget.
In one thing only he was disappointed. The trembling woman who had held him in her arms at Westleydale had never shown herself to him again. She had been called, created, for an end beyond herself. The woman he had married again was pure from passion, and of an uncomfortable reluctance in the giving and taking of caresses. He forced himself to respect her reluctance. He had simply to accept this emotional parsimony as one of the many curious facts about Anne. He no longer went to Edith for an explanation of them, for the Anne he had known in Westleydale was too sacred to be spoken of. An immense reverence possessed him when he thought of her. As for the actual present Anne, loyalty was part of the large simplicity of his nature, and he could not criticise her. Remembering Westleydale, he told himself that her blanched susceptibility was tenderness at white heat. If she said little, he argued that (like himself) she felt the more. And at times she could say perfect things.
"I wonder, Nancy," he once said to her, "if you know how divinely sweet your voice is?"