“I’ll ask you a question. Do you believe that love between a young normal woman and man can exist without passion?”
His eyes challenged hers over the deep red roses. There was a little flush on her creamy cheeks now, and the primroses were fading whitely at her breast. There was a current of electricity in the little room going from him to her. She fancied she could almost hear the beating of the wings.
“No, passion must be part of love.”
“And you wouldn’t care for a man who was content merely to love you at a respectful distance? No, you needn’t answer. I know you wouldn’t. You’re much too alive for that. You are much too passionate. A placid, hold-my-hand love would never make you happy.... Shall we have coffee upstairs in the studio?”
She nodded. The atmosphere of the little room seemed to have become too close. She was aware that her checks were burning.
She knew that she stood on the Great Threshold. It was only fair to Frank that she should decide to-night. She knew by this time enough of men to realize that self-repression, self-control are foreign to their nature and upbringing. She was content, or she could have forced herself to be content, with the indefinite relations between them. Something urged her across the threshold, and yet something that she could not grasp or define held her back. She remembered a phrase from a play she had seen a few days previously, in which a man had spoken of “woman’s innate purity.” Could she lay claim to such a possession? Clearly, no. She had dallied with the idea, she had let Frank kiss her time and again without any repugnance. A pure-minded woman would have repulsed him at the outset. She would have said, “I am a married woman. Only my husband has a right to my caresses.”
“I have forgotten the cigarettes. I’ll run down for them, if you’ll excuse me a minute.”
She nodded as she made herself comfortable on the low divan covered with cushions.
The Great Threshold! Her heart beat faster as she contemplated it. She wondered in what fashion the married women she knew had stepped across it—gaily, impulsively, with reckless abandonment, with inward shrinking, with cool deliberation—how? La Rochefoucauld once said, “Some ladies may be met with who never had any intrigue at all, but it will be exceedingly hard to find any who have had one and no more,” but then, he was only a maxim-monger, and the making of maxims, like the making of epigrams, is only a trick. If she crossed it, there would only be Frank. They would love one another secretly, and the stolen hours together would make her barren life more tolerable. Jack had made out that liaisons were nothing more than licentious flirtations. If two people really loved——