Joan did not hesitate. Although their hands were not touching, she sensed the vibration of some passionate emotion through his whole body. And now she was ready for climax. She had built up her scene. She had used her sane mind in the way that Doctor Steiner admired so much in her, that beautiful detachment and frankness of which so few women are capable. Already Doctor Steiner had encored her performance, in her imagination, and would certainly do so again in actuality when she told him the whole story to-morrow afternoon. But now she was a little tired of all that. Life is many-sided. The ideal life is one lived on all its sides. Rhythm is the fundamental law of life. So now let come emotion. She would _feel_ again. The sun and the salt air on her lips was not quite enough of sensuous comfort. She would invite Hugh’s hard, passionate, bitter kiss. Her veins were hungry for it.
“Yes, Hugh darling. I want you to give me up once and for all. Only I want it—it would break my heart if you failed to understand this!—because I do truly love you.”
She bent her head and waited for the storm. But it held off. Hugh had sat up and was looking out to sea. He said in an even tone—iron control, Joan thought he was showing—“That is the way you love me? Yes?”
“But it’s a very dear love, Hugh, isn’t it, to put your happiness ahead of my own?”
Hugh suddenly turned over and lay prone in the sand, stretched to his full length, his face on his folded arms. There was a space when he might have been dead. He was lying in the dark. Darkness of body, darkness of soul, darkness of mind. Time was lost. Then he felt the shore under him. Earth. And the sun on his back, on his neck. Out of death he had been tossed up—onto the shore of life. He lay, light as the dark waves that had swept him here, and buoyant with peace. Clean swept of all the dark. Purged of desire too. He was on a new shore. A new existence opened to him, a free man.
“I would rather have had violets.” He remembered Ariel so vividly, standing before him in the white coat, her voice and face passionately earnest. It was the only time he had ever seen her passionate about anything, except that close-shut stone-like passion of anger against Joan that Sunday, when Joan had brought Schwankovsky to call and had let him blame Hugh for ‘Noon’s’ having been relegated to the attic, and said no word about her own part in it. That was passion, if you like, but shut-in, angry.... “I would rather have had the violets,” that was passion outflowing. Beautiful.... Daring.... But he had given Joan the violets, and, he had thought, for all time. Now, however,—glory be! Joan had tossed them back. Definitely. Finally. They were his to give again....