Chapter Chapter 28 · For many hours Margaret did nothing; then she controlled herself, and

. For many hours Margaret did nothing; then she controlled herself, and

wrote some letters. She was too bruised to speak to Henry; she could

pity him, and even determine to marry him, but as yet all lay too deep

in her heart for speech. On the surface the sense of his degradation

was too strong. She could not command voice or look, and the gentle

words that she forced out through her pen seemed to proceed from some

other person.

“My dearest boy,” she began, “this is not to part us. It is everything

or nothing, and I mean it to be nothing. It happened long before we

ever met, and even if it had happened since, I should be writing the

same, I hope. I do understand.”

But she crossed out “I do understand”; it struck a false note. Henry

could not bear to be understood. She also crossed out, “It is

everything or nothing. “Henry would resent so strong a grasp of the

situation. She must not comment; comment is unfeminine.

“I think that’ll about do,” she thought.

Then the sense of his degradation choked her. Was he worth all this

bother? To have yielded to a woman of that sort was everything, yes, it

was, and she could not be his wife. She tried to translate his

temptation into her own language, and her brain reeled. Men must be

different, even to want to yield to such a temptation. Her belief in

comradeship was stifled, and she saw life as from that glass saloon on

the Great Western, which sheltered male and female alike from the fresh

air. Are the sexes really races, each with its own code of morality,

and their mutual love a mere device of Nature to keep things going?

Strip human intercourse of the proprieties, and is it reduced to this?

Her judgment told her no. She knew that out of Nature’s device we have

built a magic that will win us immortality. Far more mysterious than

the call of sex to sex is the tenderness that we throw into that call;

far wider is the gulf between us and the farmyard than between the

farmyard and the garbage that nourishes it. We are evolving, in ways

that Science cannot measure, to ends that Theology dares not

contemplate. “Men did produce one jewel,” the gods will say, and,

saying, will give us immortality. Margaret knew all this, but for the

moment she could not feel it, and transformed the marriage of Evie and

Mr. Cahill into a carnival of fools, and her own marriage—too miserable

to think of that, she tore up the letter, and then wrote another:

Dear Mr. Bast,

I have spoken to Mr. Wilcox about you, as I promised, and am sorry to

say that he has no vacancy for you.

Yours truly,