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 subdue. It was all confused and hateful because one could never know what he was thinking—whether behind those opaque gray eyes there were thoughts of love or of hatred. There were no intimacies of feeling, or even of taste. He was not a husband such as Fergus would have been, eager and naïvely honest, not stolid and dependable like Robert. . . . He was not like any man she could think of. He was an alien. . . an outsider. She remembered the taunt Rebecca had flung at her, "He is marrying you only to break your will . . . to destroy you. He has waited all these years."

But he had not done it! He had not done it! There were times when she hated only and felt powerful and strong, but times too when her strength oozed from her, leaving her only a poor, silly, feminine creature eager to please and fascinate him—a contemptible creature like those women in the corridors of the hotel in Tunis. No, she would not be destroyed thus!

"Sometimes," observed Sabine, in her cold, measured voice, "I think that men and women are born to be enemies, that even in the happiest of loves there is an element of conflict. One must possess and the other be possessed. There is no helping it. It seems to me that we are always fighting, fighting, to save the part of us which is ourself."

She laughed. "Why, we're doing it now, you know . . . the two of us. Richard, you may say, is the embodiment of all that part of men which we can never bring ourselves to accept . . . women like you and me."

"We quarreled," continued Ellen absorbed in her own trouble. "We had terrible scenes and terrible reconciliations. I am certain that he has already been unfaithful. In the end I came away, but until I stepped on the ship I was not certain that I had the courage. . . . Imagine that! . . . Imagine me not having the courage simply to go from one place to another. I did not tell him I was going until the morning I sailed. There was time then for a quarrel, but not time for a reconciliation, and so I got off." She looked out of the window and continued in a