two painters,
with their wives. A grim evening--never more so than when the
conversation turned on that perennial theme--the freedom, spiritual,
mental, physical, requisite for those who practise Art. All the stale
arguments were brought forth, and had to be joined in with unmoved faces.
And for all their talk of freedom, Lennan could see the volte-face his
friends would be making, if they only knew. It was not 'the thing' to
seduce young girls--as if, forsooth, there were freedom in doing only
what people thought 'the thing'! Their cant about the free artist spirit
experiencing everything, would wither the moment it came up against a
canon of 'good form,' so that in truth it was no freer than the bourgeois
spirit, with its conventions; or the priest spirit, with its cry of
'Sin!' No, no! To resist--if resistance were possible to this dragging
power--maxims of 'good form,' dogmas of religion and morality, were no
help--nothing was any help, but some feeling stronger than passion
itself. Sylvia's face, forced to smile!--that, indeed was a reason why
they should condemn him! None of their doctrines about freedom could
explain that away--the harm, the death that came to a man's soul when he
made a loving, faithful creature suffer.

But they were gone at last--with their "Thanks so much!" and their
"Delightful evening!"

And those two were face to face for another night.

He knew that it must begin all over again--inevitable, after the stab of
that wretched argument plunged into their hearts and turned and turned
all the evening.

"I won't, I mustn't keep you starved, and spoil your work. Don't think
of me, Mark! I can bear it!"

And then a breakdown worse than the night before. What genius, what
sheer genius Nature had for torturing her creatures! If anyone had told
him, even so little as a week ago, that he could have caused such
suffering to Sylvia--Sylvia, whom as a child with wide blue eyes and a
blue bow on her flaxen head he had guarded across fields full of
imaginary bulls; Sylvia, in whose hair his star had caught; Sylvia, who
day and night for fifteen years had been his devoted wife; whom he loved
and still admired--he would have given him the lie direct. It would have
seemed incredible, monstrous, silly. Had all married men and women such
things to go through--was this but a very usual crossing of the desert?
Or was it, once for all, shipwreck? death--unholy, violent death--in a
storm of sand?