"We have been very silly, Hugh,"
he heard her voice saying softly.
* * * * *
Hugh went to where Clara sat in a chair by a window. From him there was
no protest and no attempt to escape the love-making that followed. For a
moment he stood in silence and could see her white figure below him in the
chair. It was like something still far away, but coming swiftly as a bird
flies to him--upward to him. Her hand crept up and lay in his hand. It
seemed unbelievably large. It was not soft, but hard and firm. When her
hand had rested in his for a moment she arose and stood beside him. Then
the hand went out of his and touched, caressed his wet coat, his wet hair,
his cheeks. "My flesh must be white and cold," he thought, and then he did
not think any more.
Gladness took hold of him, a gladness that came up out of the inner parts
of himself as she had come up to him out of the chair. For days, weeks, he
had been thinking of his problem as a man's problem, his defeat had been a
man's defeat.
Now there was no defeat, no problem, no victory. In himself he did not
exist. Within himself something new had been born or another something that
had always lived with him had stirred to life. It was not awkward. It was
not afraid. It was a thing as swift and sure as the flight of the male bird
through the branches of trees and it was in pursuit of something light and
swift in her, something that would fly through light and darkness but fly
not too swiftly, something of which he need not be afraid, something that
without the need of understanding he could understand as one understands
the need of breath in a close place.
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