week before Edith
Lawrence's wedding she knew that it was coming, that something was
happening. Stuart looked like a creature driven into a corner. And he
looked sick; he seemed to have lost hold on himself. Once as she was
passing the door of his room it blew a little open and she saw him
sitting on the bed, face buried in his hands. After she passed the door
she halted--but went on. She heard him moving around in the night; once
she heard him groan. Instinctively she had sat up in bed, but had lain
down again--remembering, remembering that he was groaning because he did
not want her, because she was in the way of the woman he wanted.

She saw in those days, that week before Edith Lawrence's wedding, that
he was trying to say something to her and could not, that he was
wretched in his fruitless attempts to say it. He would come where she
was, sit there white, miserable, dogged, then go away after having said
only some trivial thing. Once--she was always quite cool, unperturbed,
through those attempts of his--he had passionately cried out, "You're
pretty superior, aren't you, Marion? Pretty damned serene!" It was a cry
of desperation, a cry from unbearable pain, but she gave no sign. Like
steel round her heart was that feeling that he was paying now.

After that outburst he did not try to talk to her; that was the last
night he was at home. He came home at noon next day and said he was
going away on a business trip. She heard him packing in his room. She
knew--felt sure--that it was something more than a business trip. She
felt sure that he was leaving. And then she wanted to go to him and say
something, whether reproaches or entreaties she did not know; listened
to him moving around in there, wanted to go and say something and could
not; could only sit there listening, hearing every smallest sound. She
heard him speak a surly word to a servant in the hall. He never spoke
that way to the servants. When he shut the front door she knew that he
would not open it again. She got to the window and saw him before he
passed from sight--carrying his bag, head bent, stooped. He was broken,
and he was going away. She knew it.

Even tonight she could not let herself think much about that afternoon,
the portentous emptiness, the strangeness of the house; going into his
room to see what he had taken, in there being tied up as with panic,
sinking down on his bed and unable to move for a long time.

She had forced herself to go to