Clytie obeyed him, half shyly, feeling, as she always did since her return to Paris, the fascination, half pleasant, half painful, of his eyes. He loved her. There was no doubt of that. Yet the nature of his love sometimes frightened her a little if she strayed for a moment off the “love plane.” Her own responsiveness she never questioned, preferring to shut her eyes and let the current of his love carry her whither it would. But at times now, during her solitary walks through the Louvre, the thought obtruded, What would the new life be like? Not these early days, which were holidays from the seriousnesses of existence, but the life in the years that lay before her, of whose responsibilities she had as yet but vague premonitions. How would her art be affected?
Would it lose or gain in that breadth and insight that it needed? Would she continue to reckon herself an artist at all, or would she only degenerate into the amateur--painting little meaningless pictures for amusement? And at the end of a year would she not stand face to face with a new Clytie, paler, more shadowy, and therefore less insistently demanding self-expression? Even these few weeks had changed her: what would she be at the end of one year, two years, twenty years? Happier, with all her old cravings satisfied, with her individuality worked out to its fullest, with the riddle of life joyously solved? Or else----She scarcely dared think of it. She looked at what had been written in her Book of New Formulas, and found that the marriage service had been omitted. It merely said that marriage was unformularisable, an easy way of curving a contumelious lip at the old formulas which she had rebelled against, but scarcely satisfactory in her present position. Now, in the Old Formulas, marriage was minutely, scrupulously regulated by the most definite of rules. Although they broke up the poem of life into a disjointed copy-book, or at best into a collection of elegant extracts, still they presented a homogeneous scheme. Should she at last have to accept this, confess to Mrs. Blather smiling complacently that the Durdleham philosophy was the only one? But then she would look at her husband and take a measure of comfort. Such a man could not come out of Durdleham.