Very shortly she must control herself
because the dinner-bell would ring and she must go. To stay and send the
conventional excuse of a headache would bring her husband up to her, and
although he was so full of his own affairs that the questions that he
would ask her would be perfunctory and absent-minded, she felt that she
could not endure, just now, to be alone with him.
She lay on her bed shivering and wondering what malign power it was that
had seized her. Malign it was, she did not for an instant doubt. She had
asked, did ask, for so little. Only to see Morris for a moment every day.
To see him anywhere in as public a place as you please, but to see him, to
hear his voice, to look into his eyes, to touch his hand (soft and gentle
like a woman's hand)--that had been now for months an absolute necessity.
She did not ask more than that, and yet she was aware that there was no
pause in the accumulating force of the passion that was seizing her. She
was being drawn along by two opposite powers--the tenderness of protective
maternal love and the ruthlessness of the lust for possession.
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