I begin to read where only yesterday I placed my mark. Yesterday and this page: to-day and this page again. How can such difference meet upon a page? But why so whole a difference? What has happened? Your parents—nothing definitive there. Nothing is lost there, surely. What you anticipated was: what is anticipated, is. Make them understand. There is a way, if not to make them understand, at least to make them.... This sense of an abysmal separateness in your eye trying to link the words upon the page with words an eye of yours saw yesterday, could not be born of what happened with your parents. Philip—what of that? When he was a danger, you did not know of him: now that you know of him, he is dead. The danger is dead. She did not yet love him. He made claim upon her, my one rival claim: and life has withdrawn it for me. A shock—she will need time—but she will recover! Did this murder shake her whom he loved as much as me who never saw him? Why not be glad then, if she be not too shaken? Do you want her prostrate? What folly is this in your will? Are the gifts of event less welcome than the gifts of nature? Aren’t you glad you have a body and a mind welcome to Mildred? Don’t you accept whatever vantage they give you? Why not accept the vantage of events? How can you help accept? John Mark, will you be morbid, like other men, when the sun and moon of life shine full on you?... Better read.
—If there is something in all this, this strangeness in you: something beside the tumult of your love, and the shock of learning how close to your desire was another hand, hot and touching your own as you reached—if there is something else, you’ll see it clearer in the morning. Don’t push your clarity. Let it ripen. Dangerously close his hand to your own? It is gone.... He may not be dead? ... a wound? No, he is murdered. And that is forever.
—Mildred is strangely dim. My memory and the note of my taut nerves tell me best at this moment how I love her. I want to see her. I want to have her vividly here. To corroborate what? I want to see again that first time when I saw her....
Evening, a dance. The electric lamps drive a stiff flood of light through the gold-paneled room. No air—this atmosphere is a harsh painted substance. Men and women are brittle or are cloying: their spirit is dark as if no air had ever entered them. The music is a weave of stuffs contorted, writhed, a hypocritical plea for gayety: its sinuous lies move through the hall and through the bodies of the dancers with a false laughter, with a macabre rhythm. Cynic music, substitute in this world for breath; as are the lamps for light.... And the coupled forms jerking slow in its rugose waves.
Then, I see Mildred! I have met her before: casually, more than once. Now, for the first time, there is the grace in me to see her!
She is air, open and coursing: she is sunlight. Her solidity is resilient. She has a body which is a luminous smile, impervious and ruthless.
“What are you doing here?” I ask her. For her antithesis is so exact ... the velvety music, the slow whining bodies ... that she is clear like a poem in a world of inarticulations.
“Let’s talk,” she says. “It will be good for you to talk. Your mood is so heavy.”
“What are you doing here?”