Poor Freda went on piling up her defenses. "Don't you see?" said she. "That's why I feel so sure of it. If it had been just me, I should never have been sure a minute. It might have gone any day, and I should have known that there was no more where it came from. But, if it's you, I can simply lean back on it and rest. Don't you see?"
(He was saying to himself: "I'm afraid Julia was right about her. Only she doesn't know it.")
"You must leave me out of it. You mustn't let yourself think that you rest on anything or anybody but yourself."
It was what Julia had said, searching her with her woman's eyes. He did not look at her as he said it.
Her nerves still shook under Julia's distant and delicate admonition to her to keep her head. It struck her that he was repeating the warning in a still more delicate and distant manner. She wondered was it possible that he was beginning to be afraid? Couldn't he see that he was safe with her? That they were safe with one another? What was she doing now but letting him see how safe they were? Hadn't she just given to their relations the last touch of spiritual completion? She had made a place for him where he could come and go at will, and rest without terror. Couldn't he see that she had set her house of life above all that, so high that nobody down here could see what went on up there, and wonder at his going out and coming in?
Keep her head, indeed! Her untroubled and untrammeled movements on her heights proved how admirably she kept it.
"You see," he continued, "it's not as if I could be always here, on the spot."
His voice still sounded the distant note of warning. It told her that there was something that he wished to make her see.
Her best answer to that was silence, and a sincere front intimating that she saw everything, and that there was nothing to touch her in the things he saw.