Page:Early Autumn (1926).pdf/252

 "So we were married, I thinking that I was in love with her, because I knew nothing of such things . . . nothing. It wasn't really love, you see. . . . Olivia, I'm going to tell you the truth . . . everything . . . all of the truth. It wasn't really love, you see. It was only that she was the only woman I had ever approached in that way . . . and I was a strong, healthy young man."

He began to speak more and more slowly, as if each word were thrust out by an immense effort of will. "And she knew nothing . . . nothing at all. She was," he said bitterly, "all that a young woman was supposed to be. After the first night of the honeymoon, she was never quite the same again . . . never quite the same, Olivia. Do you know what that means? The honeymoon ended in a kind of madness, a fixed obsession. She'd been brought up to think of such things with a sacred horror and there was a touch of madness in her family. She was never the same again," he repeated in a melancholy voice, "and when Anson was born she went quite out of her head. She would not see me or speak to me. She fancied that I had disgraced her forever . . . and after that she could never be left alone without some one to watch her. She never went out again in the world. . . ."

The voice died away into a hoarse whisper. The glass of whisky had been emptied in a supreme effort to break through the shell which had closed him in from all the world, from Olivia, whom he cherished, perhaps even from Mrs. Soames, whom he had loved. In the distance the music still continued, this time as an accompaniment to the hard, loud voice of Thérèse singing, I'm in love again and the spring is a-comin'.. . . Thérèse, the dark, cynical, invincible Thérèse for whom life, from frogs to men, held very few secrets.

"But the story doesn't end there," continued John Pent-