“You know you can.”
“And is it love—or because you think you ought to? That’s what I’ve been waiting to find out all these weary weeks.”
“You needn’t have waited, my precious darling! I knew that first day at Maidenhead.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
NIGHT
“So when morning was come, he goes to them in a surly manner, as before, and perceiving them to be very sore with the stripes that he had given them the day before, he told them, that since they were never like to come out of that place, their only way would be, forthwith to make an end of themselves, either with knife, halter, or poison: ‘For why,’ said he, ‘should you choose life, seeing it is attended with so much bitterness?’”
John Bunyan: “The Pilgrim’s Progress.”
When the nurse came to turn him out of the room, Eric steadied himself and tried to walk into the library as though nothing unusual had happened. Once there, with the morning’s letters still unanswered and the evening’s unopened, he could not decide what to do. Forgotten names, from a dream-world that he had forsaken, assailed him with clamorous insistence; his friends, of course, could not realize that for days all his interest had been concentrated on Ivy and Gaymer, with the judge and Gaisford and his own dim family grouped in the middle distance. Absurd urgency to secure his presence at the opera: “L’Heure espagnole, it’s being given for the first time”; letters from America, informing him that the writers, who would never forget the pleasure of meeting him in New York, were on their way to England... In three days their world was as remote from him as Venusburg from the regenerate Tannhaüser; America was but a country in which he had thought of finding a sanctuary for his wife. There was no need now for him to take Ivy abroad; and for three weeks he had worked and schemed in the expectation of going to America in the autumn for six months or a year....
Readjustment....