“Hysterical!” she repeats, after a pause, in a low key of suspicion. “Why was she hysterical? How did she show that she was hysterical?”
A slight flush, or so she fancies, passes over his hollow cheeks.
“Oh, I don’t know. How do people usually show it?”—with impatient evasion.
“Laughing? Crying?”
“Yes, yes; that sort of thing!” Then, with an upbraiding accent, that escapes him against his will, “Why should we talk about her, poor soul?”
“Why not?” she answers. “What else is there to talk about? There is nothing else.”
The words, extravagant as they are, represent to Lavinia the exact truth. He! She! There is nothing else in God’s universe; and before both him and her stands the prohibitory angel, the flame of whose waved sword blinds them to all creation also. She looks straight before her in dogged despair, and a caught half-sobbing breath beside her tells her with what a strangling grip the temptation is taking him by the throat. Yet this time she puts out no finger, utters no wisely trivial commonplace to help him. The mental picture of Féodorovna clinging sobbing round his neck, even though she knows with what repellant grudgingness that embrace had been met, has robbed Lavinia of all further power of fight than what lies in silence. He does not leave her even that.
“We shall hear of each other indirectly, I suppose?” he says by-and-by, in a voice not the clearer for the lump in his throat, which is clearly past his power to swallow.
Her cup of misery runs over. “No doubt,” she answers with a shuddering distinctness. “If you ask Féodorovna, she will write you a long account of my wedding! She is a great letter-writer!”
As if the words possessed some paralyzing spell over their feet, both of them stop dead short; and, turning round, stare full in each other’s faces, conversation shrivelling up its thin fabric in that fiery moment; and then—the inevitable happens. The gasping lips draw nearer, nearer, nearer; the idly hanging arms stretch themselves out, enfold, embrace, crush; and, with no apparent initiation on either side, Fate hurls them upon one another’s forbidden breasts. Their kisses are frantic with the haste of six wasted weeks, and have their edge given by the knowledge that, for these sad two, there is only one little dreg at the bottom of the wine-cup of life and love, and that if they do not make haste to drain it, it will be poured out on the desert ground that is soaked with the lost vintages meant to appease the thirst of parched humanity.