She ran from him fleetly, hardly knowing why she was so angry, but it seemed to her that he had no right to be content without her love; she felt he must be emasculate, and the guilty passion of Francis Sales was, by contrast, splendid. But for that passion, Charles Batty might have persuaded her she was incapable of rousing men’s desire and not to rouse it was not to be a woman. Accordingly, she valued Francis and despised the other, yet when she had reached home and run upstairs and was standing in the dim room where the firelight cast big, uncertain shadows, like vague threats, on walls and ceiling, she suffered a reaction.
The scene on the road became sinister: she remembered the strange silence of the trees and the clangorous barking of the dogs, the hoarse voices from the encampment in the hollow. It had been very dark there and an extraordinary blackness had buried her when she was in that man’s arms. It had been dark, too, on the hill, but with a feeling of space and height and freedom. If Charles had been a little different—but then, he did not really want her; he was making a study of his sorrow, he was gazing at it, turning it round and over, growing familiar with all its aspects. He was an artist frustrated of any power but this of feeling and to have given him herself would simply have been to rob him of what he found more precious. But she and Francis Sales were kin; she understood him: he was not better than herself, perhaps he was not so good and he, too, was unhappy, but he did not love her for those qualities of which Charles Batty had talked by the Monks’ Pool, he wove no poetry about her: he loved her because she was pretty; because her mouth was red and her eyes bright and her body young: he loved her because, being her father’s daughter, her youth answered his desire with enough shame to season appetite, but not to spoil it. And she thought of Christabel as of some sick doll.
Dinner was a strange meal that night. Caroline’s chair was empty, and the sighs of Sophia were like gentle zephyrs in the room. Henrietta’s silence might have been interpreted as anxiety about her aunt and Susan informed the cook, truly enough, that Miss Henrietta had a feeling heart.