“I must be pretty awful,” he thought.
Sitting on a chair in the park, he considered his shortcomings. He had considered them before, often. But he had never done anything about them. He knew in advance that he wouldn’t do anything about them this time. Poor Elinor! That rigmarole of Molly’s about platonic relations and Paul Bourget gave him a notion of what she had to put up with. He decided to tell her of his adventure with Molly—comically, for it was always easier to talk unseriously—and then go on to talk about themselves. Yes, that was what he’d do. He ought to have spoken before. Elinor had been so strangely and unnaturally silent of late, so far away. He had been anxious, had wanted to speak, had felt he ought to have spoken. But about what? The ridiculous episode with Molly provided him with an opening gambit.
“I saw Molly d’Exergillod this afternoon,” he began, when he saw Elinor. But the tone of her “Did you?” was so coldly uninterested that he went no further. There was a silence. Elinor went on with her reading. He glanced at her surreptitiously over the top of his book. Her pale face wore an expression of calm remoteness. He felt a renewal of that uneasy anxiety which had come upon him so often during the last few weeks.
“Why don’t you ever talk now?” he screwed up the courage to ask her that evening after dinner.
Elinor looked up at him from her book. “Don’t I ever talk?” she said, ironically smiling. “Well, I suppose there’s nothing of any particular interest to say.”
Philip recognized one of the answers he was in the habit of making to her reproaches, and was abashed into silence. And yet it was unfair of her to retort it upon him. For in his case it was true: there really wasn’t anything of interest to say. By dint of being secretive about them, he had almost abolished his intimate feelings. Very little seemed to go on in the unintellectual part of his mind—very little, at any rate, that wasn’t either trivial or rather discreditable. Whereas Elinor always had a mass of things to say. Things that said themselves, that came out of their own accord from the depths of her being. Philip would have liked to explain this to her; but somehow it was difficult, he couldn’t.
“All the same,” he brought himself to say, after a pause, “you used to talk much more. It’s only in these last days …”
“I suppose I’m rather tired of talking, that’s all.”
“But why should you be tired?”
“Mayn’t one be tired sometimes?” She uttered a rather resentful little laugh. “You seem to be permanently tired.”
Philip looked at her with a kind of anxiety. His eyes seemed to implore. But she wouldn’t allow herself to be touched. She had allowed herself to be touched too often. He had exploited her love, systematically underpaid her, and, whenever she threatened rebellion, had turned suddenly rather pathetic and helpless, appealing to her better feelings. This time she was going to be hard. He might look as imploring and anxious as he liked, but she wouldn’t take any notice. It only served him right. All the same, she felt rather guilty. And yet it was his own fault. Why couldn’t he love her actively, articulately, outright? When she gave him her love, he took it for granted, he accepted it passively as his right. And when she stopped giving it, he looked dumbly anxious and imploring. But as for saying anything, as for doing anything …
The seconds passed. Elinor waited, pretending to read. If only he’d speak or move! She longed for an excuse to love him again. As for Everard—why, Everard simply didn’t count. To the deep instinctive core of her being he really didn’t matter, and if Philip would only take the trouble to love her a little, he wouldn’t matter any more even to the conscious part of her that was trying to love him—to love him on principle, so to speak, to love him deliberately, of set purpose. But the seconds passed in silence. And at last, with a little sigh (for he too would have liked to say something, to do something; only it was impossible, because the something said or done would have to be personal), Philip picked up his book and, in the interests of the zoological novelist in his novel, went on reading about the possessive instinct in birds. Reading again. He wasn’t going to say anything after all. Oh, very well; if he wanted her to become Everard’s mistress, then he’d have only himself to blame. She tried to shrug her shoulders and feel truculently. But the threat, she inwardly felt, was directed against herself rather than against Philip. It was she, not he, who was being condemned. Condemned to be Everard’s mistress.
Taking a lover had seemed to Elinor, theoretically and in advance, a matter of no great difficulty. Morally wrong she did not think it. All the fuss that Christians and the heroines of novels managed to make about it! It was incomprehensible. “If people want to go to bed with one another,” she would say, “why can’t they do it quite simply and straightforwardly, without tormenting themselves and everyone else within range?” Nor had she any fear of the social consequences of taking a lover. The people who, if they knew, would object, were precisely the people she herself had always objected to. By refusing to meet her, they would be doing her a favour. As for Phil, he would have deserved it. He had had it in his power to prevent any such thing
