Miss Louisa Wright was sorry for you. She would ask you to tea in her little green-dark drawing-room; she lived in the ivy house next door to Mrs. Waugh; the piano would be open, the yellow keys shining; from the white title page enormous black letters would call to you across the room: “Cleansing Fires.” That was the song she sang when she was thinking about Dr. Charles. First you played for her the “Moonlight Sonata,” and then she sang for you with a feverish exaltation:
“For as gold is refined in the fi-yer,
So a heart is tried by pain.”
She sang it to comfort you.
Her head quivered slightly as she shook the notes out of her throat in ecstasy.
She was sorry for you; but she was like Aunt Lavvy; she thought it was a good thing to be jilted; for then you were purified; your soul was set free; it went up, writhing and aspiring, in a white flame to God.
II
“Mary, why are you always admiring yourself in the glass?”
“I’m not admiring myself. I only wanted to see if I was better-looking than last time.”
“Why are you worrying about it? You never used to.”
“Because I used to think I was pretty.”
Her mother smiled. “You were pretty.” And took back her smile. “You’d be pretty always if you were happy, and you’d be happy if you were good. There’s no happiness for any of us without Christ.”
She ignored the dexterous application.
“Do you mean I’m not, then, really, so very ugly?”
“Nobody said you were ugly.”
“Maurice Jourdain did.”
“You don’t mean to say you’re still thinking of that man?”
“Not thinking exactly. Only wondering. Wondering what it was he hated so.”
“You wouldn’t wonder if you knew the sort of man he is. A man who could threaten you with his infidelity.”
“He never threatened me.”
“I suppose it was me he threatened, then.”
“What did he say?”
“He said that if his wife didn’t take care to please him there were other women who would.”
“He ought to have said that to me. It was horrible of him to say it to you.”
She didn’t know why she felt that it was horrible.
“I can tell you one thing,” said her mother, as if she had not told her anything. “It was those books you read. That everlasting philosophy. He said it was answerable for the whole thing.”
“Then it was the—the whole thing he hated.”
“I suppose so,” her mother said, dismissing a matter of small interest. “You’d better change that skirt if you’re going with me to Mrs. Waugh’s.”
“Do you mind if I go for a walk instead?”
“Not if it makes you any more contented.”
“It might. Are you sure you don’t mind?”
“Oh, go along with you!”
Her mother was pleased. She was always pleased when she scored a point against philosophy.
III
Mr. and Mrs. Belk were coming along High Row. She avoided them by turning down the narrow passage into Mr. Horn’s yard and the Back Lane. From the Back Lane you could get up through the fields to the schoolhouse lane without seeing people.
She hated seeing them. They all thought the same thing: that you wanted Maurice Jourdain and that you were unhappy because you hadn’t got him. They thought it was awful of you. Mamma thought it was awful, like—like Aunt Charlotte wanting to marry the piano-tuner, or poor Jenny wanting to marry Mr. Spall.
Maurice Jourdain knew better than that. He knew you didn’t want to marry him any more than he wanted to marry you. He nagged at you about your hair, about philosophy—she could hear his voice nag-nagging now as she went up the lane—he could nag worse than a woman, but he knew. She knew. As far as she could see through the working of his dark mind, first he had cared for her, cared violently. Then he had not cared.
That would be because he cared for some other woman. There were two of them. The girl and the married woman. She felt no jealousy and no interest in them beyond wondering which of them it would be and what they would be like. There had been two Mary Oliviers; long-haired—short-haired, and she had been jealous of the long-haired one. Jealous of herself.
There had been two Maurice Jourdains, the one who said, “I’ll understand. I’ll never lose my temper”; the one with the crystal mind, shining and flashing, the mind like a big room filled from end to end with light. But he had never existed.
Maurice Jourdain was only a name. A name for intellectual beauty. You could love that. Love was “the cle‑eansing fi-yer!” There was the love of the body and the love of the soul. Perhaps she had loved Maurice Jourdain with her soul and not with her body. No. She had not loved him with her soul, either. Body and soul; soul and body. Spinoza said they were two aspects of the same thing. What thing? Perhaps it was silly to ask what thing; it would be just body and soul. Somebody talked about a soul dragging a corpse. Her body wasn’t a corpse; it was strong and active; it could play games and jump; it could pick Dan up and carry him round the table; it could run a mile straight on end. It could excite itself with its own activity and strength. It dragged a corpse-like soul, dull and heavy; a soul that would never be excited again, never lift itself up again in any ecstasy.
If only he had let her alone. If only she could go back to her real life. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t feel any more her sudden, secret happiness. Maurice Jourdain had driven it away. It had nothing to do with Maurice Jourdain. He ought not to have been able
