You see I’m convinced that something did happen that night in the library. I say, he never told me precisely what it was, but he once let something out. We were discussing one of Pauline’s love-affairs (after the separation she gave him endless grounds for divorce).
“Poor Pauline,” he said, “she thinks she’s so passionate.”
“Well,” I said, “wasn’t she?”
Then he burst out. “No. She doesn’t know what passion is. None of you know. You haven’t the faintest conception. You’d have to get rid of your bodies first. I didn’t know until—”
He stopped himself. I think he was going to say, “until Rosamund came back and showed me.” For he leaned forward and whispered: “It isn’t a localized affair at all.... If you only knew—”
So I don’t think it was just faithfulness to a revived memory. I take it there had been, behind that shut door, some experience, some terrible and exquisite contact. More penetrating than sight or touch. More—more extensive: passion at all points of being.
Perhaps the supreme moment of it, the ecstasy, only came when her phantasm had disappeared.
He couldn’t go back to Pauline after that.
IF THE DEAD KNEW
I