And she never came back; for she was not only afraid of Rosamund, she was afraid of Marston. And if she _had_ come it wouldn’t have been any good. Marston was convinced that, as often as he attempted to get to Pauline, something would stop him. Pauline certainly felt that, if Rosamund were pushed to it, she might show herself in some still more sinister and terrifying form. She knew when she was beaten.
And there was more in it than that. I believe he tried to explain it to her; said he had married her on the assumption that Rosamund was dead, but that now he knew she was alive; she was, as he put it, “there.” He tried to make her see that if he had Rosamund he couldn’t have _her_. Rosamund’s presence in the world annulled their contract.
You see I’m convinced that something _did_ happen that night in the library. I say, he never told me precisely what it was, but he once let something out. We were discussing one of Pauline’s love-affairs (after the separation she gave him endless grounds for divorce).
“Poor Pauline,” he said, “she thinks she’s so passionate.”
Then he burst out. “No. She doesn’t know what passion is. None of you know. You haven’t the faintest conception. You’d have to get rid of your bodies first. _I_ didn’t know until—”
He stopped himself. I think he was going to say, “until Rosamund came back and showed me.” For he leaned forward and whispered: “It isn’t a localized affair at all.... If you only knew—”
So I don’t think it was just faithfulness to a revived memory. I take it there had been, behind that shut door, some experience, some terrible and exquisite contact. More penetrating than sight or touch. More—more extensive: passion at all points of being.
Perhaps the supreme moment of it, the ecstasy, only came when her phantasm had disappeared.
He couldn’t go back to Pauline after _that_.
The voluntary swelled, it rose, it rushed to its climax. The organist tossed back his head with a noble gesture, exalted; he rocked on his bench; his feet shuffled faster and faster, pedalling passionately.
The young girl who stood beside him drew in a deep, rushing breath; her heart swelled; her whole body listened, with hurried senses desiring the climax, the climax, the crash of sound. Her nerves shook as the organist rocked towards her; when he tossed back his head her chin lifted; she loved his playing hands, his rocking body, his superb, excited gesture.