“The wish burst out to the surface?” She seemed to be calmly annotating him.
“That must be it,” David spoke pensively.
“Then, you must answer me two questions.... Why didn’t you want to know before to-night, that you wanted to come? And what brought you to knowing at this particular time?”
She was leaning back in her chair and smiling; it seemed to David she was leaning forward and with serious face. As if this had been the truth, he reacted. He found himself withdrawing: slightly chilled at himself as if he had done an extravagant thing.
“Is there no such thing as a mere whim or mood?”
Constance Bardale understood his reversal in a flash. The contest was on: his dull playing to her hands was over. For a moment she had feared he was going to be sentimental. She was afraid of emotional words as a priestess of a desecration at her altar. Here he was, struggling away. Her delight released the energy of movement. A peal of laughter, low like her words; a somewhat mental laughter: flush of roused energy which in a more serious contingence must have turned into flight or pursuit.
She got up and redisposed herself on the couch. Her act was at once, in its motion, an expenditure of force and, in its specific nature, preparation for future outlet. David already found in himself the wish to go and sit beside her.
The fear, lest it be the false thing to do—lest she dislike it, rebuke him, misunderstand. Misunderstand what? David did not know, because he found that he did not care. He sat there now, measuring his wish to sit beside her with what was in her eyes—to find if it fitted.
They chatted. David knew less and less what he was saying, as he grew more engrossed in the problem of his desire. Did he dare go and sit beside her? He found no answer in her. Her look, like what she said, was oblique and opaque. She seemed impenetrable to his seeking mind, but in inverse ratio she seemed vulnerable to his fleeing senses. His mental will to measure the effect of his coming to her faded from inanition: his desire to come was less dependent on intellectual assurance.
He was unconscious of all this. Until, quiet and quick, he was up from his chair in a silence and beside her. Nothing had happened. He was dumb and he was empty, as if this coming close had been a mere beginning after all of what he was about: as if he were still upon his journey. Nothing had happened. David leaned over to her face that was at profile from him. At once she turned to him. She gave him her lips. Nothing happened. He kissed her. He sat beside her silent. The sense persisting of a way half gone, of a will half done. He felt the sharp power of her body under a frail gown. Nothing had happened at all. So he took her in his arms.