“They were intended to apply to life as well.”

“Then what you are saying is that you never loved me.”

“I could not say that.”

She had turned from him. He went behind her again.

“But you must say that! You must say, ‘I was totally evil, I never saw in him other than an instrument I could use, a destruction I could encompass. For now I don’t care that he still loves me, that in all his travels he has not seen a woman to compare with me, that he is a ghost, a shadow, a half-being for as long as he remains separated from me.’” She had bowed her head. He lowered his voice. “You must say, ‘I do not care that his crime was to have shown a few hours’ indecision, I don’t care that he has expiated it by sacrificing his good name, his…’ not that that matters, I would sacrifice everything I possess a hundred times again if I could but know… my dearest Sarah, I…”

He had brought himself perilously near tears. He reached his hand tentatively towards her shoulder, touched it; but no sooner touched it than some imperceptible stiffening of her stance made him let it fall.

“There is another.”

“Yes. There is another.”

He threw her averted face an outraged look, took a deep breath, then strode towards the door.

“I beg you. There is something else I must say.”

“You have said the one thing that matters.”

“The other is not what you think!”

Her tone was so new, so intense, that he arrested his movement towards his hat. He glanced back at her. He saw a split being: the old, accusing Sarah and one who begged him to listen. He stared at the ground.

“There is another in the sense that you mean. He is… an artist I have met here. He wishes to marry me. I admire him, I respect him both as man and as artist. But I shall never marry him. If I were forced this moment to choose between Mr…. between him and yourself, you would not leave this house the unhappier. I beg you to believe that.” She had come a little towards him, her eyes on his, at their most direct; and he had to believe her. He looked down again. “The rival you both share is myself. I do not wish to marry. I do not wish to marry because… first, because of my past, which habituated me to loneliness. I had always thought that I hated it. I now live in a world where loneliness is most easy to avoid. And I have found that I treasure it. I do not want to share my life. I wish to be what I am, not what a husband, however kind, however indulgent, must expect me to become in marriage.”

“And your second reason?”

“My second reason is my present. I never expected to be happy in life. Yet I find myself happy where I am situated now. I have varied and congenial work—work so pleasant that I no longer think of it as such. I am admitted to the daily conversation of genius. Such men have their faults. Their vices. But they are not those the world chooses to imagine. The persons I have met here have let me see a community of honorable endeavor, of noble purpose, I had not till now known existed in this world.” She turned away towards the easel. “Mr. Smithson, I am happy, I am at last arrived, or so it seems to me, where I belong. I say that most humbly. I have no genius myself, I have no more than the capacity to aid genius in very small and humble ways. You may think I have been very fortunate. No one knows it better than myself. But I believe I owe a debt to my good fortune. I am not to seek it elsewhere. I am to see it as precarious, as a thing of which I must not allow myself to be bereft.” She paused again, then faced him. “You may think what you will of me, but I cannot wish my life other than it is at the moment. And not even when I am besought by a man I esteem, who touches me more than I show, from whom I do not deserve such a faithful generosity of affection.” She lowered her eyes. “And whom I beg to comprehend me.”

There had been several points where Charles would have liked to interrupt this credo. Its contentions seemed all heresy to him; yet deep inside him his admiration for the heretic grew. She was like no other; more than ever like no other. He saw London, her new life, had subtly altered her; had refined her vocabulary and accent, had articulated intuition, had deepened her clarity of insight; had now anchored her, where before had been a far less secure mooring, to her basic conception of life and her role in it. Her bright clothes had misled him at first. But he began to perceive they were no more than a factor of her new self-knowledge and self-possession; she no longer needed an outward uniform. He saw it; yet would not see it. He came back a little way into the center of the room.

“But you cannot reject the purpose for which woman was brought into creation. And for what? I say nothing against Mr.…” he gestured at the painting on the easel “… and his circle. But you cannot place serving them above the natural law.” He pressed his advantage. “I too have changed. I have learned much of myself, of what was previously false in me. I make no conditions. All that Miss Sarah Woodruff is, Mrs. Charles Smithson may continue to be. I would not ban you your new world or your continuing pleasure in it. I offer no more than an enlargement of your present happiness.”

She went to the window, and he advanced to the easel, his eyes on her. She half turned.

“You do not understand. It is not your fault. You are very kind. But I am not to be understood.”

“You forget you have said that to me before. I think you make it a matter of pride.”

“I meant that I am not to be understood even by myself. And I can’t tell you why, but I believe my happiness depends on my not understanding.”

Charles smiled, in spite of himself. “This is absurdity. You refuse to entertain my proposal because I might bring you to understand yourself.”

“I refuse, as I refused the other gentleman, because you cannot understand that to me it is not an absurdity.”

She had her back turned again; and he began to see a glimmer of hope, for she seemed to show, as she picked at something on the white transom before her, some of the telltale embarrassment of a willful child.

“You shan’t escape there. You may reserve to yourself all the mystery you want. It shall remain sacrosanct to me.”

“It is not you I fear. It is your love for me. I know only too well that nothing remains sacrosanct there.”

He felt like someone denied a fortune by some trivial phrase in a legal document; the victim of a conquest of irrational law over rational intent. But she would not submit to reason; to sentiment she might lie more open. He hesitated, then went closer.

“Have you thought much of me in my absence?”

She looked at him then; a look that was almost dry, as if she had foreseen this new line of attack, and almost welcomed it. She turned away after a moment, and stared at the roofs of the houses across the gardens.

“I thought much of you to begin with. I thought much of you some six months later, when I first saw one of the notices you had had put in—”

“Then you did know!”

But she went implacably on. “And which obliged me to change my lodgings and my name. I made inquiries. I knew then, but not before, that you had not married Miss Freeman.”

He stood both frozen and incredulous for five long seconds; and then she threw him a little glance round. He thought he saw a faint exultation in it, a having always had this trump card ready—and worse, of having waited, to produce it, to see the full extent of his own hand. She moved quietly away, and there was more horror in the quietness, the apparent indifference, than in the movement. He followed her with his eyes. And perhaps he did at last begin to grasp her mystery. Some terrible perversion of human sexual destiny had begun; he was no more than a footsoldier, a pawn in a far vaster battle; and like all battles it was not about love, but about possession and territory. He saw deeper: it was not that she hated men, not that she materially despised him more than other men, but that her maneuvers were simply a part of her armory, mere instruments to a greater end. He saw deeper still: that her supposed present happiness was another lie. In her central being she suffered still, in the same old way; and that was the mystery she was truly and finally afraid he might discover.