Well, she thought that on the whole she was glad. The curtain was about to fall on that drama that had begun at the Business School in Holborn, and so there would be an end of that.... What now? What about those fancy pictures with which she had beguiled herself as she had ridden on buses and trams and worked at her crochet during the rests? What about those half-whispered, nonsensical conversations? What about those drowsy, secret quarters of an hour out of which she had come with slight starts to smile at herself? They were to be married. What next?
The answer came as if for months it had been merely awaiting her pleasure. It was as plain as day that she could now have as much of these as ever she pleased. For what it was worth, the freedom of her cuckoo-cloud-land was about to be definitely made over to her. Because nothing else was hers, that was all the more hers.... Kitty's tidings brought it so sharply home to her that she forgot that those sweet hours of licence were no new thing. She forgot that it was no new thing to walk, in fancy, the woods of Mallard Bois and the lanes of Rainham Parva with him by her side, no new thing to call his name down the remembered glades—"Jim!" (not, as others called him, "Jeff"). She forgot that it was old and outworn already; she saw in it only newness and liberty and delight. A Jim of sorts was now hers, ineluctably and for ever—a Jim who did not fool predestined spinsters—a Jim who would know better than blunder into a blind and stupid marriage—a Jim whose relentless hand had not—had not—had not——
But here, as she paused, the colour that had made her cheeks rosy ebbed as if a brush loaded with white had been passed over them. His ruthless hand had—had—almost certainly had——
It was as if, in her fancy, a prison bell had tolled and a black flag had been run up in the morning breeze——
He was certainly a murderer; over the threshold of that hideous fact she must step before she could enter her palace of insubstantial delights. Stained she must take even the phantom of his hand, or not at all. Suppose the joy were to leave her, but the horror to remain?
She closed her eyes.
But she opened them again. She faced it. Say he was—that; what then? The joy and the horror were fatally one. A man capable of all—all—even of that—and her lover! Oh, the moment the shudder had passed the worst was over! He had killed; yes, but for a cause! He had been horribly to be feared; yes, but without the dread of him too she would not have had the whole of him, and she wanted the whole of him. Not kill, with such a reason? Withhold death, with something approaching that was worse than death? Oh, Louie knew all about that; Miss Cora had told her....
A murder? There were things by the side of which a murder, once you had made up your mind to it, was a trifle!
Are women so? Is it so that they will place their soft hands, like willow-leaves, in those other hands that may be black with dreadful work, red with destruction, yet, seeing less than man and more than man, they care not? Is it so that they will set their lips, as if for a kiss, against the mouth of war itself with its ten thousand deaths? It seems to be so. Their loved ones, when they die, do not do so of fevers and shattered tissues, but of their own clear and trusted heroism. "Go," they say to the next one, even to the little Jimmy, "go—and come back if you may—and, though wooden props keep you together, you shall be beautiful to the mother who bore you—to the wife whose task it must be to take you to pieces and put you together again—to the woman who, because of her own heavenly dreaming, cannot think of the fiend you were in that hour when the call sounded and you dropped the point of your lance to the charge."
But one thing was clear: her dreams must remain dreams. If she would keep what was left her, she must never, never, never see him now!