“There’s another woman.”
He was angry. “It’s not so.” More force spilling away that her body yearned for. This urged her on.
“There’s another woman!”
She needed his focussing upon her, even if it were but in wrath. She stood over him now. She knew he loved her so, with the lines of her body shrill and clarified in standing. Tom was white with anger. He grasped her and broke her in anger. She laughed in love....
He loved her as never before, that afternoon. Because he loved her as never again.
The year that David lived alone was the year of Tom’s struggle with him. It was not a question of changing his life. It was a question of capturing the subjective opposition, as it came forward in the nearness of his new friend.
Tom knew a way. This inner inhibition stood objectified in David. Let him capture David. David was his old love of giving instead of constantly taking, of being calm and passive instead of constantly pursuing. In him, Tom saw the restful cleanliness of despising this race he was running hotly: the futility of spending one’s dreams upon a contest that was never done and whose prize was death. He would not give up his entry. He needed the mundane sense of power, the badge of success: he was too sensual to forego the liquor of attention. But he needed also to still the voice that kept saying: “Fool!” By the old process of projection, he now saw these words in the eyes of David. If he could have David, he could have silence.
He watched him with a growing steadfastness and a dwindling clarity. He knew at last that he wanted to win him. He knew that the affection between David and Cornelia stood most in his way.
All that year, he studied David. He came to understand his habits and his moods. He inserted himself upon his groping friend with the deliberate reserve of a chemist applying weighed ingredients to a solution.
The measuring was no easy task. David was within himself. He was hidden. It was plain he showed more of his mind and spirit to Cornelia than to her brother. They spent evenings, late afternoons together. Walks on Sundays became almost a custom. Tom was frequently along. There was no slightest wish to bar him. But Cornelia encouraged those very traits in David that must keep him intractable, secure to himself.