No absolutely unexpected revelation could have quite the same quality of shock.She went through the whole thing to me with a remarkable detachment, told me how she had felt--and the odd things it seemed to open to her.
"I WANT to be kissed, and all that sort of thing," she avowed."Isuppose every woman does."
She added after a pause: "And I don't want any one to do it."This struck me as queerly expressive of the woman's attitude to these things."Some one presently will--solve that," I said.
"Some one will perhaps."
I was silent.
"Some one will," she said, almost viciously."And then we'll have to stop these walks and talks of ours, dear Master....I'll be sorry to give them up.""It's part of the requirements of the situation," I said, "that he should be--oh, very interesting! He'll start, no doubt, all sorts of new topics, and open no end of attractive vistas....You can't, you know, always go about in a state of pupillage.""I don't think I can," said Isabel."But it's only just recently I've begun to doubt about it."I remember these things being said, but just how much we saw and understood, and just how far we were really keeping opaque to each other then, I cannot remember.But it must have been quite soon after this that we spent nearly a whole day together at Kew Gardens, with the curtains up and the barriers down, and the thing that had happened plain before our eyes.I don't remember we ever made any declaration.We just assumed the new footing....
It was a day early in that year--I think in January, because there was thin, crisp snow on the grass, and we noted that only two other people had been to the Pagoda that day.I've a curious impression of greenish colour, hot, moist air and huge palm fronds about very much of our talk, as though we were nearly all the time in the Tropical House.But I also remember very vividly looking at certain orange and red spray-like flowers from Patagonia, which could not have been there.It is a curious thing that I do not remember we made any profession of passionate love for one another; we talked as though the fact of our intense love for each other had always been patent between us.There was so long and frank an intimacy between us that we talked far more like brother and sister or husband and wife than two people engaged in the war of the sexes.We wanted to know what we were going to do, and whatever we did we meant to do in the most perfect concert.We both felt an extraordinary accession of friendship and tenderness then, and, what again is curious, very little passion.But there was also, in spite of the perplexities we faced, an immense satisfaction about that day.It was as if we had taken off something that had hindered our view of each other, like people who unvizard to talk more easily at a masked ball.
I've had since to view our relations from the standpoint of the ordinary observer.I find that vision in the most preposterous contrast with all that really went on between us.I suppose there Ishould figure as a wicked seducer, while an unprotected girl succumbed to my fascinations.As a matter of fact, it didn't occur to us that there was any personal inequality between us.I knew her for my equal mentally; in so many things she was beyond comparison cleverer than I; her courage outwent mine.The quick leap of her mind evoked a flash of joy in mine like the response of an induction wire; her way of thinking was like watching sunlight reflected from little waves upon the side of a boat, it was so bright, so mobile, so variously and easily true to its law.In the back of our minds we both had a very definite belief that making love is full of joyous, splendid, tender, and exciting possibilities, and we had to discuss why we shouldn't be to the last degree lovers.
Now, what I should like to print here, if it were possible, in all the screaming emphasis of red ink, is this: that the circumstances of my upbringing and the circumstances of Isabel's upbringing had left not a shadow of belief or feeling that the utmost passionate love between us was in itself intrinsically WRONG.I've told with the fullest particularity just all that I was taught or found out for myself in these matters, and Isabel's reading and thinking, and the fierce silences of her governesses and the breathless warnings of teachers, and all the social and religious influences that had been brought to bear upon her, had worked out to the same void of conviction.The code had failed with us altogether.We didn't for a moment consider anything but the expediency of what we both, for all our quiet faces and steady eyes, wanted most passionately to do.
Well, here you have the state of mind of whole brigades of people, and particularly of young people, nowadays.The current morality hasn't gripped them; they don't really believe in it at all.They may render it lip-service, but that is quite another thing.There are scarcely any tolerable novels to justify its prohibitions; its prohibitions do, in fact, remain unjustified amongst these ugly suppressions.You may, if you choose, silence the admission of this in literature and current discussion; you will not prevent it working out in lives.People come up to the great moments of passion crudely unaware, astoundingly unprepared as no really civilised and intelligently planned community would let any one be unprepared.They find themselves hedged about with customs that have no organic hold upon them, and mere discretions all generous spirits are disposed to despise.
