Norah's thought did not run on subtle lines. Life for her fell into watertight compartments. She had loved Archie with a whole-hearted romantic passion. That was over, many months dead and shut away in its own little coffin. The succeeding phase of wifely duty, half kindly, half grudging, was over too and disposed in its less honoured grave. Now she stood, as she thought, on the threshold of a new world, a reborn Norah with no past to catch her feet."
"When she propounded that illusion," said Ross, "I really couldn't help laughing. As if we, prisoners lying in the dark, blindfolded with every shade of prejudice, handcuffed with immemorial habits, fettered by years of education, accidental or deliberate, chained to almost automatic reactions, could ever start afresh. We who don't get a fresh start in the womb, where too we're the slaves of a past that drags us along from amœba to ape.
And that is inside ourselves: the outside world does not stand aside, hat in hand, to let us start afresh.
Still Norah was perhaps freer than some of us. She felt no moral qualms. The seventh—is it?—commandment to her had always seemed an over-rated affair, a question to be solved more by fastidiousness than morality. She had always assumed the right to please herself. And now she was well pleased. Dick was the ideal lover—happy, charming, attentive. She had found the mate Nature had created for her—lion-hearted and debonair, the match for any emergency life might produce, ready for any risk, game for battle with the gods, who, when at last she had yielded to his entreaties, had shouted with Troilus that he would 'throw his glove to Death himself.'
Yes, she had chosen well this time. All idols hadn't feet of clay, some surely were pure gold. The old and disillusioned could not be right. She turned from that distasteful theory to the beauty of the lake.
As the islands and the shore receded, the formation of the 800-mile-long crater revealed itself.
Outside towered a circle of hyacinthine blue from whose summit perhaps at a time before there were men to suffer, the great cone had been hurled, leaving a lip here straight as a sword, here jagged as a jaw of shattered teeth. Inwards from the torn sides of the stupendous bowl radiated, like fingers from a monstrous hand, hills, in these days thick with trees, dimpled with valleys.
These spurs or buttresses gave on to the lake sometimes in a cliff or tumble of boulders, sometimes in a sloping facet like the hip of a slate roof. Down the valleys between them swift streams hurried or, failing to find a bed, fell in cascades down thousands of feet. In spite of the beauty Norah shivered.
'Don't you feel like a mouse in a bucket?' she said.
As the sun rose higher and hotter, the irregularity of the engines became more marked—in Alibaba's words, 'worse as before, sir.' Dick's features had drawn into a frown which even Norah could not lighten and irritably he paced the narrow deck.