must bear his insinuations, though from the lips of a man who had behaved as he had behaved their force should not have been sharp. Nevertheless, what he said had its force, she mused; partly because he seemed unconscious of his own lapse in the case of Mary Datchet, and thus baffled her insight; partly because he always spoke with force, for what reason she did not yet feel certain.
‘Absolute sincerity is rather difficult, don’t you think?’ she inquired, with a touch of irony.
‘There are people one credits even with that,’ he replied a little vaguely. He was ashamed of his savage wish to hurt her, and yet it was not for the sake of hurting her, who was beyond his shafts, but in order to mortify his own incredibly reckless impulse of abandonment to the spirit which seemed, at moments, about to rush him to the uttermost ends of the earth. She affected him beyond the scope of his wildest dreams. He seemed to see that beneath the quiet surface of her manner, which was almost pathetically at hand and within reach for all the trivial demands of daily life, there was a spirit which she reserved or repressed for some reason either of loneliness or— could it be possible?—of love. Was it given to Rodney to see her unmasked, unrestrained, unconscious of her duties? a creature of uncalculating passion and instinctive freedom? No; he refused to believe it. It was in her loneliness that Katharine was unreserved. ‘I went back to my room by myself and I did—what I liked.’ She had said that to him, and in saying it had given him a glimpse of possibilities, even of confidences, as if he might be the one to share her loneliness, the mere hint of which made his heart beat faster and his brain spin. He checked himself as brutally as he could. He saw her redden, and in the irony of her reply he heard her resentment.
He began slipping his smooth, silver watch in his pocket, in the hope that somehow he might help himself back to the calm and fatalistic mood which had been his when he looked at its face upon the bank of the lake, for that mood must, at whatever cost, be the mood of his intercourse with Katharine. He had spoken of gratitude and acquiescence in the letter which he had never sent, and now all the force of his character must make good those vows in her presence.
She, thus challenged, tried meanwhile to define her points. She wished to make Denham understand.
‘Don’t you see that if you have no relations with people it’s easier to be honest with them?’ she inquired. ‘That is what I meant. One needn’t cajole them; one’s under no obligation to them. Surely you must have found with your own family that it’s impossible to discuss what matters to you most because you’re all herded together, because you’re in a conspiracy, because the position is false—’ Her reasoning suspended itself a little inconclusively, for the subject was complex, and she found herself in ignorance whether Denham had a family or not. Denham was agreed with her as to the destructiveness of the family system, but he did not wish to discuss the problem at that moment.
He turned to a problem which was of greater interest to him.
‘I’m convinced,’ he said, ‘that there are cases in which perfect sincerity is possible—cases where there’s no relationship, though the people live together, if you like, where each is free, where there’s no obligation upon either side.’
‘For a time—perhaps,’ she agreed, a little despondently. ‘But obligations always grow up. There are feelings to be considered. People aren’t simple, and though they may mean to be reasonable, they end’—in the condition in which she found herself, she meant, but added lamely—‘in a muddle.’
‘Because,’ Denham instantly intervened, ‘they don’t make themselves understood at the beginning. I could undertake, at this instant,’ he continued, with a reasonable intonation which did much credit to his self-control, ‘to lay down terms for a friendship which should be perfectly sincere and perfectly straightforward.’
She was curious to hear them, but, besides feeling that the topic concealed dangers better known to her than to him, she was reminded by his tone of his curious abstract declaration upon the Embankment. Anything that hinted at love for the moment alarmed her; it was as much an infliction to her as the rubbing of a skinless wound.
But he went on, without waiting for her invitation.
‘In the first place, such a friendship must be unemotional,’ he laid it down emphatically. ‘At least, on both sides it must be understood that if either chooses to fall in love, he or she does so entirely at his own risk. Neither is under any obligation to the other. They must be at liberty to break or to alter at any moment. They must be able to say whatever they wish to say. All this must be understood.’
‘And they gain something worth having?’ she asked.
‘It’s a risk—of course it’s a risk,’ he replied. The word was one that she had been using frequently in her arguments with herself of late.
‘But it’s the only way—if you think friendship worth having,’ he concluded.
‘Perhaps under those conditions it might be,’ she said reflectively.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘those are the terms of the friendship I wish to offer you.’ She had known that this was coming, but, none the less, felt a little shock, half of pleasure, half of reluctance, when she heard the formal statement.
‘I should like it,’ she began, ‘but—’
‘Would Rodney mind?’
‘Oh no,’ she replied quickly.
‘No, no, it isn’t that,’ she went on, and again came to an end. She had been touched by the unreserved and yet ceremonious way in which he had made what he called his offer of terms, but if he was generous it was the more necessary for her to be cautious. They would find themselves in difficulties, she speculated; but, at this point, which was not very far, after all, upon the road of caution, her foresight deserted her. She sought for some definite catastrophe into which they must inevitably plunge. But she could think of none. It seemed to her that these catastrophes were fictitious; life went on and on—life was different altogether from what people said. And not only was she at an end of her stock of caution, but it seemed suddenly altogether superfluous. Surely if any one could take care of himself, Ralph Denham could; he had told her that he did not love her. And, further, she meditated, walking on beneath the beech-trees and swinging her umbrella, as in her thought she was accustomed to complete freedom, why should she perpetually apply so different a standard to her behaviour in practice? Why, she reflected, should there be this perpetual disparity between the thought and the action, between the life of solitude and the life of society, this astonishing precipice on one side of which the soul was active and in broad daylight, on the other side of which it was contemplative and dark as night? Was it not possible to step from one to the other, erect, and without essential change? Was this not the chance he offered her—the rare and wonderful chance of friendship ? At any rate, she told Denham, with a sigh in which he heard both impatience and relief, that she agreed; she thought him right; she would accept his terms of friendship.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘let’s go and have tea.’
