a
critical moment for Louth, and a critical moment for her. Their marriage
would smooth out the whole situation, would set him free from all money
miseries, and her from greater miseries still--torments of desire, and
the horror of being laughed at or pitied by her set. And in any case she
felt that the time had arrived when she must do something drastic; must
either achieve or frankly and definitely give up. She knew that she was
nearing the end of her tether. She could not much longer keep up the
brilliant pretence of being an untiring Amazon crammed full of the joie
de vivre which she had assumed for the purpose of winning Rupert Louth
as a husband. Her powers of persistence were rapidly waning. Only will
drove her along, in defiance of the warnings and protests of her body.
But the untiring Amazon was cracking up, to use a favourite expression
of Louth's. Soon the weary, middle-aged woman must claim her miserable
rights: the right to be tired occasionally, the right to "slack off"
at certain hours of the day, the right to find certain things neither
suitable nor amusing to her, the right, in fact, to be now and then a
middle-aged woman. Certainly something in her said to Lady Sellingworth:
"In your marriage, if you marry, you will have to act even better, even
more strenuously, than you are acting now. Being in love as you are, you
will never be able to dare to be your true self. Your whole married life
will be a perpetual throwing of dust in the eyes of your husband. To
keep him you will have to live backwards, or to try to live backwards,
all the time. If you are tired now, what will you be then?" And she knew
that the voice was speaking the truth. Her imp, too, was watching
her closely and with an ugly intensity of irony as she approached her
decision.

Nevertheless, she defied him; she defied the voice within her, and took
it. She said to herself, or her worn nervous system said to her, that
there was nothing else to be done. In her fatigue of body and nerves she
felt reckless as only the nearly worn out feel. Something--she didn't
know what--had cast the die for her. It was her fate to open Rupert
Louth's eyes, to make him see; it was her fate to force her will into
a last strong spasm. She would not look farther than the day. She would
not contemplate her married life imaginatively, held in contemplation,
like a victim, by the icy hands of reason. She would kick reason out,
harden herself, give her wildness fr