It was only recently that she perceived that in spite
of her adoration of him, her jealousy, her servitude,
her pride, she fundamentally despised him—and
her contempt blended indistinguishably with her other
emotions.... All this was her love—the
vital and feminine illusion that had directed itself
toward him one April night, many months before.
On Anthony’s part she was, in spite of these
qualifications, his sole preoccupation. Had he
lost her he would have been a broken man, wretchedly
and sentimentally absorbed in her memory for the remainder
of life. He seldom took pleasure in an entire
day spent alone with her—except on occasions
he preferred to have a third person with them.
There were times when he felt that if he were not left
absolutely alone he would go mad—there
were a few times when he definitely hated her.
In his cups he was capable of short attractions toward
other women, the hitherto-suppressed outcroppings
of an experimental temperament.
That spring, that summer, they had speculated upon
future happiness—how they were to travel
from summer land to summer land, returning eventually
to a gorgeous estate and possible idyllic children,
then entering diplomacy or politics, to accomplish,
for a while, beautiful and important things, until
finally as a white-haired (beautifully, silkily, white-haired)
couple they were to loll about in serene glory, worshipped
by the bourgeoisie of the land.... These times
were to begin “when we get our money”;
it was on such dreams rather than on any satisfaction
with their increasingly irregular, increasingly dissipated
life that their hope rested. On gray mornings
when the jests of the night before had shrunk to ribaldries
without wit or dignity, they could, after a fashion,
bring out this batch of common hopes and count them
over, then smile at each other and repeat, by way of
clinching the matter, the terse yet sincere Nietzscheanism
of Gloria’s defiant “I don’t care!”
Things had been slipping perceptibly. There was
the money question, increasingly annoying, increasingly
ominous; there was the realization that liquor had
become a practical necessity to their amusement—not
an uncommon phenomenon in the British aristocracy
of a hundred years ago, but a somewhat alarming one
in a civilization steadily becoming more temperate
and more circumspect. Moreover, both of them seemed
vaguely weaker in fibre, not so much in what they
did as in their subtle reactions to the civilization
about them. In Gloria had been born something
that she had hitherto never needed—the skeleton,
incomplete but nevertheless unmistakable, of her ancient
abhorrence, a conscience. This admission to herself
was coincidental with the slow decline of her physical
courage.
Then, on the August morning after Adam Patch’s
unexpected call, they awoke, nauseated and tired,
dispirited with life, capable only of one pervasive
emotion—fear.
