“But it’s very important to be genuine,” she said.
She led him on to tremendous confidences. She met the sympathetic figures of his life, Aunt Moira and Aunt Percy, with sincere understanding; and she told him that she found his life strange and exciting and adventurous—and Ivor, looking at it with the impulse of her sympathy, also found it strange and exciting and adventurous.
“It’s odd,” he said, “how one minute’s perfect comradeship can discount all previous solitudes.”
She brought the truth out of him, he saw that, and how can a woman bring the truth out of a man except by understanding him? Clearly, then, she was his friend. It was so wonderful a fact that it almost overwhelmed him; her wise friendliness revealed her to him as a marvellous gift of a god, and a much more than fleshly god, too! And his mind so circled about the fact of this grave and gay Magdalen with the friendly eyes and deep, dexterous understanding—that he was probably very dull indeed towards the end of dinner. But Magdalen teased him about that very gently, for she had always thought that no man was a man who wasn’t sometimes frightfully dull.
3
And yet, as the night grew to midnight and past, all was not well with Ivor Marlay.... They were on the wide divan, a battlefield of a divan, in the window corner of the “room of state”—now changed into a room deliciously intimate and secret, with but the one dim light of a very shaded lamp, near them, to light its rich shadows and make more pregnant the pregnant silences of two people. And there were several silences, in the restless passage over midnight. Magdalen lay full length on the divan, a luxuriously straight figure, her crossed hands supporting the back of her head against a wide cushion of many colours. A tranquil figure she looked, lying straightly there, with her eyes peacefully on him—and yet little peace was there in Magdalen Gray at that moment, or ever! Now, behind her tranquil poise, she wanted frightfully to mock him by inquiring, quite casually, how, at his absurd age, he had discovered that restraint is the highest pleasure of la volupté. She wanted to ask him that, but it was just as well she didn’t, for he wouldn’t have known what she was talking about, being much more completely twenty-three than he (or she) thought.
To the cold eye of the philosopher there is nothing more ridiculous than abandon, except it be restraint: there is nothing more absurd than temptation, except it be the grander temptation not to yield to it. But it is notorious that philosophers never allow for other people’s ideals—which do certainly make the ridiculous even more ridiculous, but rarely fail to make it sublime. And Ivor Pelham Marlay, now fired at last out of the lethargy of two years, was become a very rigid and proper idealist, and very troublesome to himself, which is the way of idealists.... He was distressed, in that restless passage over midnight. He wondered, very dimly, if masculine brutalities were peculiar to essentially feminine woman; years later, he found that they were. She wanted her way of him, in her own way, now! He saw that, because she didn’t hide it; she didn’t hide it because she hadn’t that kind of restraint, she was deplorable. She wanted to “find out.” He had knowledge of her as a woman without shame and without pride in love. He called it love, because he was certain that it was love, as far as he was concerned, anyway. She had no pride, she said. “There is no pride in love, Ivor. Not really. To be proud in love is the mark of little people. Pride is for women who go to balls or night-clubs every night, and who, because they are always tired, bring the worst out of their men; they need pride. But your great lover is so proud that he takes no thought of pride.” But, on top of that, she had no shame either—and that he shamelessly loved! He adored the honest quality of her shamelessness, its elegance and its clear shades of candour. Thus, every minute increased his longing for her, every minute increased his feeling of her nearness; and the slim, soft lines of her body maddeningly suggested the coil of her limbs—but it couldn’t, it simply couldn’t, happen like “this”! “This” was all wrong, in this particular instance. She was too splendid, he wanted her too utterly, to allow it to happen like “this.” He wanted her—oh, vastly! She was wanton, he knew that. He felt that, but he could not understand it—she who was so absolutely right, so sensible! She was amazing. She wanted to be ravished, like a woman in a dream....
“Ivor!” she said suddenly. “I wish for a peach.”
There was a basket of them on a little table, in the shadows of the room; and, in the shadows, the peaches that had that morning graced the Piccadilly windows of Messrs. Solomon’s were changed into lovely baubles, they looked like Oriental things of beauty and significance: they looked like the peaches that are found in books, ruddy and ripe and bejewelled.
“And, if you please,” she said, “I’d like it peeled or skinned, or whatever the process is called that uncovers a peach.”