"I see how it is. You're tired, and no wonder. You've had a long and exhausting day. Better go to bed. We'll have to be up early."
Glad to escape from his presence I allowed him to lead me to the large bedroom. As I was crossing the threshold he told me to undress and get into bed, and after that he said something about waiting. Then he closed the door softly and I was alone.
THIRTY-SIXTH CHAPTER
There was a fire in the bedroom and I sat down in front of it. Many forces were warring within me. I was trying to fix my thoughts and found it difficult to do so.
Some time passed. My husband's man came in with the noiseless step of all such persons, opened one of the portmanteaux and laid out his master's combs and brushes on the dressing table and his sleeping suit on the bed. A maid of the hotel followed him, and taking my own sleeping things out of the top tray of my trunk she laid them out beside my husband's.
"Good-night, my lady," they said in their low voices as they went out on tiptoe.
I hardly heard them. My mind, at first numb, was now going at lightning speed. Brought face to face for the first time with one of the greatest facts of a woman's life I was asking myself why I had not reckoned with it before.
I had not even thought of it. My whole soul had been so much occupied with one great spiritual issue—that I did not love my husband (as I understood love), that my husband did not love me—that I had never once plainly confronted, even in my own mind, the physical fact that is the first condition of matrimony, and nobody had mentioned it to me or even hinted at it.
I could not plead that I did not know of this condition. I was young but I was not a child. I had been brought up in a convent, but a convent is not a nursery. Then why had I not thought of it?