“I don’t see how.”
“By the fire I will tell you.”
“I don’t think I ought to come.”
“What is life if it is always what ought and what ought not? I do not go by that. I am not able to think always of that. And do you? Oh, no!”
He cast a peculiar glance at her, full of intense shrewdness. It made her remember the Cafe Royal on the evening of her meeting with the Georgians, her pressure put on Dick Garstin to make Arabian’s acquaintance, her lonely walk in the dark when Arabian had followed her, her first visit to Garstin’s studio, her pretended reason for many subsequent visits there. This man must surely have understood always the motive which had governed her in what she had done. His glance told her that. It pierced through her pretences like a weapon and quivered in the truth of her. He had always understood her. Was he at last going to let her understand him? His eyes seemed to say, “Why pretend any longer with me? You wanted to know me. You chose to know me. It is too late now to play the conventional maiden with me.”
It is too late now.
Her will seemed to be dying out of her. She walked on beside him mechanically. She knew that she was going to do what he wished, that she was going to his flat again; and when they reached Rose Tree Gardens without any further protest she got into the lift with him and went up to his floor. But when he was putting the latchkey into the door the almost solemn words of Dick Garstin came back to her: “Beryl, believe it or not, as you can, that is Arabian!” And she hesitated. An intense disinclination to go into the flat struggled with the intense desire to yield herself to Arabian’s will. Arabian was before her eyes, standing there by the opening door, and Garstin’s portrait was before the eyes of her mind in all its magnificent depravation. Which showed the real man and which the unreal? Garstin said that he had painted her intuition about Arabian, that she knew Arabian’s secret and had conveyed it to him. Was that true?
“Please!” said Arabian, holding open the door.
“I cannot come in,” she said, in a dull, low voice.
Beyond the gap of the doorway there lay perhaps the unknown territory called by Garstin the underworld. She remembered the piercingly shrewd look Arabian had cast at her by the river, a look which had surely included her with him in the region which lies outside all the barriers. But she did not belong to that region. Despite her keen curiosities, her resolute defiance of the conventions, her intensely modern determination to live as she chose to live, she would never belong to it. A horrible longing which she could not understand fought with the fear which Garstin that day had dragged up from the depths of her to the surface. But she now gave herself to the fear, and she repeated doggedly: