His wife looked at him queerly for a moment; then she meekly answered:
Once only during their long married life had she flouted him when he had spoken to her like that. Then in ungovernable fury he had thrown a boot at her head.
Mr. Hardacre glared at Morland and Connie, and scrambled cursing into his chair.
SOMETHING had happened--something mysterious, quickening; a pulsation of the inmost harmonies of life. Its tremendous significance Jimmie dared not conjecture. It was to be interpreted by the wisdom of the simplest, yet that interpretation he put aside. It staggered reason. It was enough for them to have met together in an unimagined intimacy of emotion, to have shared the throb of this spiritual happening.
She was to be married in three days. He set the fact as a block to further investigation of the mystery. On this side his loyalty suffered no taint; their relations had but received, in some sense, sanctification. Beyond the barrier lay shame and dishonour. The two were to be married; therefore they loved. He disciplined a disordered mind with a logic of his own invention. It was a logic that entirely begged the question. Remembered words of Norma, “Do you think much love has come my way? Yours are the only lips I have ever heard speak of it,” fell outside his premises. They clamoured for explanation. So did the rich tremor of her voice. So did the lamentable lack of conviction in his reply. To these things he closed his intelligence. They belonged to the interpretation that staggered reason, that threatened to turn his fundamental conceptions into chaos. And past incidents came before him. During those last days in Wiltshire he had seen that her life lacked completion. That memory, too, disturbed his discipline. Fanatically he practised it, proving to himself that ice was hot and that the sun shone at midnight. She was happy in her love for Morland. She was happy in Morland's love for her. She had not identified with herself the imaginary woman of his adoration. She had not drunk in the outpouring of his passion. Her breath had not fallen warm upon his cheek. And the quickening of a wonderful birth had no reference to emotions and cravings quite different, intangible, inexpressible, existent in a far-away spirit land.