“You’re just confusing the issues, Jimmy,” she said sadly. “But you can’t change them. It isn’t right for married people, happily married people, to leave their homes and children for their own individual pleasure.”
“But we’re not happily married people,” said Jimmy.
“If we’re not,” said Jane steadfastly, “it’s only our own fault. Neither Stephen nor Agnes has ever sinned against us. They love us and they trust us. They trusted us, once for all, with their life happiness. I couldn’t feel decent, Jimmy, and betray that trust.”
“Jane,” said Jimmy, “I don’t understand you. With all your innocence you’ve always seemed so emancipated. Intellectually emancipated. You’ve always seemed to understand the complications of living. To sympathize with the people who were tangled up in them. You’ve always said—”
“Oh, yes,” said Jane, “I’ve done a lot of talking. It made me feel very sophisticated to air my broad-minded views. I was very smug about my tolerance. I used to say to Isabel that I could understand how anybody could do anything. I used to laugh at Mamma for her Victorian views. I used to think it was very smart to say that every Lakewood housewife was potentially a light lady. I used to think I believed it. I did believe it theoretically, Jimmy. But now—now when it comes to practice—I see there’s a great difference.”
“But there isn’t any difference, Jane,” said Jimmy. “Not any essential difference. Just one of convention. You’re a woman before you’re a Lakewood housewife. ‘The Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady are sisters under their skins!’ ”
“But they’re not, Jimmy! That’s just Kipling’s revolt against Victorian prudery. I suppose he felt very sophisticated when he first got off that line! The complications of living seem very complicated when you look at them from a distance. When you’re tangled up in them yourself, you know they’re very simple. If you’re really the Colonel’s lady, Jimmy, no matter how little you may want to do it, you know exactly what you ought to do.” She turned away from him and stood staring out through the terrace doors at the April garden. For a long time there was silence in the room. Then—
“I—I don’t believe—you love me,” said Jimmy slowly.
Jane turned her white face from the April garden.
“Then you’re wrong, Jimmy,” she said gently. “You’re very wrong. It’s killing me to do this thing I’m doing. It’s killing me to be with you, here in this room. Will you please go away—back to town, I mean—and—and don’t come back until you’ve accepted my decision.”
“I’ll never accept it,” said Jimmy grimly.
“Then don’t come back,” said Jane.
Without another word he left the room. Jane opened the terrace doors and walked out into the garden. She walked on beyond the clump of evergreens and sat down on the bench beneath the apple tree. She had been sobbing a long time before she realized that she still held Jimmy’s handkerchief in her hand. She buried her face in it until the sobs were stilled in a mute misery that Jane felt was going to last a lifetime. She sat more than an hour on that bench. When she returned to the house, Sarah told her that Mr. Trent had gone back to the city on the eleven-fifteen.
VII
Five days later, Jimmy returned to Lakewood. He turned up, early in the afternoon, and found Jane superintending the gardener, who was spading up the rose-bed in the garden.
She looked up from the roots of a Dorothy Perkins and saw him standing on the terrace. She was no longer surprised that she was so easily able to dissemble her emotion. Jane had had plenty of practice in the fine art of dissembling emotion during the last five days.
“I think you’d better order another load of black earth, Swanson,” she said casually and turned to walk over to the terrace.
Jimmy stood there, quite motionless, watching her approach through the sunny garden. His face was very serious and his smile was very grave. Jane ascended the terrace steps and held out her hand to him. He took it in silence and held it very tightly.
“You don’t know what it does to me,” said Jimmy, “to see you again.”
“Have you accepted my decision?” said Jane.
“No,” said Jimmy abruptly, “of course not. Did you think I would?” He drew her hand through his arm and led her over to the corner of the terrace that was sheltered by the oak trees. The oak trees were just bursting into pink and wine-red buds. They did not give much shelter, but from that terrace corner you could not see the rose-bed.
“I asked you not to come back until you had,” said Jane, withdrawing her hand from the crook of his arm and sitting down on the brick parapet of the terrace.
“Jane, you’re really invincible,” smiled Jimmy. “Invincibly determined as well as invincibly innocent! Do you really mean to tell me that you haven’t spent the last five days regretting that you sent me out of your life?”
“I don’t think that there’s anything to laugh at in this situation,” said Jane severely.
“Darling!” said Jimmy—in a moment he was all penitence and contrition—“I’m not laughing. You know I’m not laughing. I’m preserving the light touch—something very different in situations of an emotional character. But I repeat my question—haven’t you been awfully sorry?”
“Of course I’ve been sorry,” said Jane. “I’ve been in hell.”
Jimmy looked down at her very tenderly.
“I’ve been there with you, Jane,” he said soberly. “Don’t you think it’s time you let us both out?”
Jane shook her head.
“I guess we’re there to stay, Jimmy,” she said. “Do you know, as far as I’m concerned, I almost hope I will stay there. The one thing that I couldn’t bear would be the thought that I could ever get over you.”
“Why?” said Jimmy.
“To feel the way I feel about you, Jimmy,” said Jane, “and then to get over it, would be the most disillusioning of all human experiences. I’m going to keep faith, forever, with
