It is like what I have heard happens when people are going to die, or be executed. Is being forty like that? Does it mean that I do mind being forty, though I think I don’t?
Hugo said that we must hold out till the end; I have had to hold out longer than he did, and it has seemed, often, that if I let myself think, or feel much, I couldn’t do it. That was before this deadening came, that makes it easier; but now I am not afraid. Something is past, some danger is past, and now I know that I shall be able to hold out till the end. I do not believe in immortality, and yet I feel, somehow, that Hugo will know if I keep my promise.
Walter is in bed, asleep; and I am by the window, alone. There is a bright moon coming up now behind the houses opposite, and in the moonlight the colours are changing; the yellow and red grow paler, and less violent. Even on this road there comes a quiet and beauty of the night.
And my life up to now comes before me very clearly; the people and the places, and the choices and mistakes, and I seem to see it all in better proportion than before; less clouded and blurred across by the violent emotion of youth.
Guy, and Hugo, and Cousin Delia, and Sophia Lane-Watson, and Diana, and Walter, and George Addington, and Mollie; and Yearsly, and Hampstead, and here; but Hugo goes through it all; when I try to think of my life without Hugo, it is impossible; it is as though there were nothing there at all.
And really, so little has happened to me; my life has been a very ordinary one; no adventures, nothing dramatic, just the same sort of life as most of the women I meet in the street, and think so dull. The lady who lives opposite, in the house with the bow window, has three grown-up sons, and two daughters. She is much older than I am, her life must have had more in it than mine. Does it seem to her, I wonder, as intricate, and poignant as mine does to me?
I suppose that it does, when she thinks about it; and I suppose that is only seldom, just as it is with me.
Perhaps before her fiftieth and sixtieth birthdays she thought about it, and perhaps she thought it very interesting.
I wonder if I should think so too, if she told it to me.