Chapter 12

Catherine made much of Virginia’s fainting.

‘What she want to faint for?’ asked Christopher sceptically. ‘A great girl like that.’

‘Well, she did. So of course I couldn’t leave her sooner.’

But when she was saying this sort of thing she felt uncomfortable. Such tiresome almost lying, such petty almost truth. She seemed now to walk continually in small deceits. It was as though her feet couldn’t move a step without getting into a tangle of repulsive little cobwebs. Nothing much really; nothing more than she supposed most women, whom she began to think of as creatures necessarily on the defensive, had to wade through; but so different from the clean-swept path along which she had all her life till then proceeded. All her life? All her death. That hadn’t been life. Up to her marriage with Christopher she had merely been dead. Now she was alive; and mustn’t she take the stings and the pains and even the pettiness of life gladly, in return for its beatitudes?

But they worried her, the stings and the pains and the pettiness. Also, beatitudes were expensive. They forced her to go oftener to Maria Rome, and the oftener she went the more she needed her. It was like drug-taking. And suppose there should come a point—in her heart she knew it must come—when Maria’s ministrations would merely accentuate what they were intended to hide? Once or twice lately she had fancied they had been less successful; or was it that there was more to do to her the deeper she sank in this business of being young and happy? She led a racked life, an uneasy mixture of fears and blisses. And the grey in her hair seemed to multiply, and it too had to be treated by Maria Rome, and she began to look more and more like somebody adventurous, —she who was really the most unadventurous of perch-clinging doves.

The thought of Virginia’s life, —Virginia, so young, so needing to do nothing to herself, so completely at ease with her elderly husband—made her sigh as the overheated and overtired sigh at the thought of cool shadows and clear waters. There was a difference, and it was simply all the difference in the world, between their two cases. She had been horribly right when at the beginning she snubbed Christopher for declaring there wasn’t. Stephen didn’t need to watch Virginia as she watched Christopher, anxiously on the alert for the least sign of change in her, in what she did, what she said, in the very tone in which she said it. Stephen was safe, was at rest; Virginia would never, never do anything but love him. He was the father of her child, the authority she looked up to, the intelligence she adored. But Catherine—she wasn’t going to be the mother of any child of Christopher’s, she hadn’t got any intelligence for him to adore, and wouldn’t have wished to have authority, even if she could have, for him to look up to. For her there was nothing but strain and effort, with the tormenting knowledge that her very strain and effort were bound to bring about what she dreaded.