wearing down unperceived.
And there came a change in Isabel. It was like some change in the
cycle of nature, like the onset of spring-a sharp brightness, an
uneasiness. She became restless with her work; little encounters
with men began to happen, encounters not quite in the quality of the
earlier proposals; and then came an odd incident of which she told
me, but somehow, I felt, didn't tell me completely. She told me all
she was able to tell me. She had been at a dance at the Ropers',
and a man, rather well known in London, had kissed her. The thing
amazed her beyond measure. It was the sort of thing immediately
possible between any man and any woman, that one never expects to
happen until it happens. It had the surprising effect of a judge
generally known to be bald suddenly whipping off his wig in court.
No absolutely unexpected revelation could have quite the same
quality of shock. She went through the whole thing to me with a
remarkable detachment, told me how she had felt-and the odd things
it seemed to open to her.
"I WANT to be kissed, and all that sort of thing," she avowed. "I
suppose every woman does."
She added after a pause: "And I don't want any one to do it."
This struck me as queerly expressive of the woman's attitude to
these things. "Some one presently will-solve that," I said.
"Some one will perhaps."
I was silent.
"Some one will," she said, almost viciously. "And then we'll have
to stop these walks and talks of ours, dear Master… I'll be
sorry to give them up."
"It's part of the requirements of the situation," I said, "that he
should be-oh, very interesting! He'll start, no doubt, all sorts
of new topics, and open no end of attractive vistas… You
can't, you know, always go about in a state of pupillage."
"I don't think I can," said Isabel. "But it's only just recently
I've begun to doubt about it."
I remember these things being said, but just how much we saw and
understood, and just how far we were really keeping opaque to each
other then, I cannot remember. But it must have been quite soon
after this that we spent nearly a whole day together at Kew Gardens,
with the curtains up and the barriers down, and the thing that had
happened plain before our eyes. I don't remember we ever made any
declaration. We just assumed the new footing…
It was a day early in that year-I think in January, because there
was thin, crisp snow on the grass, and we noted that only two other
people had been to the Pagoda that day. I've a curious impression
of greenish colour, hot, moist air and huge palm fronds about very
much of our talk, as though we were nearly all the time in the
Tropical House. But I also remember very vividly looking at certain
orange and red spray-like flowers from Patagonia, which could not
have been there. It is a curious thing that I do not remember we
made any profession of passionate love for one another; we talked as
though the fact of our intense love for each other had always been
patent between us. There was so long and frank an intimacy between
us that we talked far more like brother and sister or husband and
wife than two people engaged in the war of the sexes. We wanted to
know what we were going to do, and whatever we did we meant to do in
the most perfect concert. We both felt an extraordinary accession
of friendship and tenderness then, and, what again is curious, very
little passion. But there was also, in spite of the perplexities we
faced, an immense satisfaction about that day. It was as if we had
taken off something that had hindered our view of each other, like
people who unvizard to talk more easily at a masked ball.
I've had since to view our relations from the standpoint of the
ordinary observer. I find that vision in the most preposterous
contrast with all that really went on between us. I suppose there I
should figure as a wicked seducer, while an unprotected girl
succumbed to my fascinations. As a matter of fact, it didn't occur
to us that there was any personal inequality between us. I knew her
for my equal mentally; in so many things she was beyond comparison
cleverer than I; her courage outwent mine. The quick leap of her
mind evoked a flash of joy in mine like the response of an induction
wire; her way of thinking was like watching sunlight reflected from
little waves upon the side of a boat, it was so bright, so mobile,
so variously and easily true to its law. In the back of our minds
we both had a very definite belief that making love is full of
joyous, splendid, tender, and exciting possibilities, and we had to
discuss why we shouldn't be to the last degree lovers.
Now, what I should like to print here, if it were possible, in all
the screaming emphasis of red ink, is this: that the circumstances
of my upbringing and the circumstances of Isabel's upbringing had
left not a shadow of belief or