That’s all a nightmare; but, when the door is
closed upon them, like a nightmare gone. She
was alone upon the staircase and then down in the
hall—by those coats!—and, as
though no ghastly interval had been, the amazing and
beloved moment was returned to her. Out of a
nightmare into a dream! She stood in her dream
a moment—two moments—three—by
the hall door. Who till that evening never had
thought of love, astonishingly was invested with all
love’s darling cunning. She felt somehow
he would see her again before she left; and love’s
dear cunning told her right. He came swiftly down
the stairs. She never knew on what pretext he
had left the room. He came to her. Love
loves these snatched moments and always makes them
snatched to breathlessness. She opened the door
and must be gone. She said to him, speaking first,
“Oh, we were vile in there! How vile we
were!”
It was, the intimacy and the abruptness of it, the
perfect comprehension that their thoughts were shared,
as if they had known and loved for years.
He caught her hand. “My conspirator!
My secret-sharer!”
She gave him her heart in her eyes.
He said, “To-morrow, I will come to you.”
She disengaged her hand.
He gave a swift look all about and caught her in his
arms. “You must tell me, my Rosalie.
Tell me.”
She breathed, “You knew, before I knew, that
I loved you.”
When she was home and got to her room she undressed,
suffering her clothes to lie as they slipped from
her. She got into bed, moving there and then
lying there as one in trance.
Cataclysm! All she had been, all she had determined—all,
all gone; all nothing, surrendered all. At a
touch, in a moment, without a cry, without a shot,
without a stroke, all her life’s habit swept
away. All she had been, all she’d designed,
all she had built within herself and walled about
herself, all she had scorned, all that with a violent
antipathy she had shuddered from or with curled lip
spurned away,—all, all betrayed, breached,
mined, calamitously riven, tumultously sundered, burst
away.
She turned her face to the pillow and began to cry—most
frightfully.
It was very terrible for Rosalie.
PART THREE—HOUSE OF CHILDREN
CHAPTER I
There’s none so sick as, brought to bed, that
robust he that ever has scorned sickness; nor any
sinner like a saint suddenly gone from saintliness
to sin; and there can be no love like love suddenly
leapt from repression into being.
Rosalie, that had abhorred the very name of love,
now finding love was quite consumed by love.
She loved him so! Even to herself she never could
express how tremendous a thing to her their love was.
She used deliberately to call it to her mind (as the
new, rapt possessor of a jewel going specially to
the case to peep and gloat again) and when she called
it up like that, or when, in the midst of occupation,
her mind secretly opened a door and she turned and
saw it there, a surge, physically felt, passed through
her, and she would nearly gasp, her breath taken by
this new, this rapturous element, as the bather’s
at his first plunge in the cold, the splendid sea.
