Page 140 of 296 CHAPTER XVIII - Night and Day

"No, no, of course not," she said, stirring the leaves with her hand. "But you don't understand me, William--"

"Help me to understand you--"

"You don't understand, I mean, my real feelings; how could you? I've only now faced them myself. But I haven't got the sort of feeling--love, I mean--I don't know what to call it"--she looked vaguely towards the horizon sunk under mist--"but, anyhow, without it our marriage would be a farce--"

"How a farce?" he asked. "But this kind of analysis is disastrous!" he exclaimed.

"I should have done it before," she said gloomily.

"You make yourself think things you don't think," he continued, becoming demonstrative with his hands, as his manner was. "Believe me, Katharine, before we came here we were perfectly happy. You were full of plans for our house--the chair-covers, don't you remember?--like any other woman who is about to be married. Now, for no reason whatever, you begin to fret about your feeling and about my feeling, with the usual result. I assure you, Katharine, I've been through it all myself. At one time I was always asking myself absurd questions which came to nothing either. What you want, if I may say so, is some occupation to take you out of yourself when this morbid mood comes on. If it hadn't been for my poetry, I assure you, I should often have been very much in the same state myself. To let you into a secret," he continued, with his little chuckle, which now sounded almost assured, "I've often gone home from seeing you in such a state of nerves that I had to force myself to write a page or two before I could get you out of my head. Ask Denham; he'll tell you how he met me one night; he'll tell you what a state he found me in."

Katharine started with displeasure at the mention of Ralph's name. The thought of the conversation in which her conduct had been made a subject for discussion with Denham roused her anger; but, as she instantly felt, she had scarcely the right to grudge William any use of her name, seeing what her fault against him had been from first to last. And yet Denham! She had a view of him as a judge. She figured him sternly weighing instances of her levity in this masculine court of inquiry into feminine morality and gruffly dismissing both her and her family with some half-sarcastic, half-tolerant phrase which sealed her doom, as far as he was concerned, for ever. Having met him so lately, the sense of his character was strong in her. The thought was not a pleasant one for a proud woman, but she had yet to learn the art of subduing her expression. Her eyes fixed upon the ground, her brows drawn together, gave William a very fair picture of the resentment that she was forcing herself to control. A certain degree of apprehension, occasionally culminating in a kind of fear, had always entered into his love for her, and had increased, rather to his surprise, in the greater intimacy of their engagement. Beneath her steady, exemplary surface ran a vein of passion which seemed to him now perverse, now completely irrational, for it never took the normal channel of glorification of him and his doings; and, indeed, he almost preferred the steady good sense, which had always marked their relationship, to a more romantic bond. But passion she had, he could not deny it, and hitherto he had tried to see it employed in his thoughts upon the lives of the children who were to be born to them.

		"It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man's to keep unmarried as long as he can." George Bernard Shaw