... a delicious life.

But ... this black gown ... my dead ... I have nothing but my grief,
nothing but my grief. What wrong have I perpetrated that my grief should
forever sing in my ears?

Ah, just to forget.... Everywhere the earth breathing happiness, the
blue, blue rolling waves, the almond trees veiled in faery whiteness,
everywhere the nuptials of joy.

Grief, where are you? Everywhere space terribly alive, with hope in
every color and death just died for the last time.

XIII

It happened as it does in novels. The man suddenly feels the beast of
prey panting within him and yields to it hotly; the woman writhes under
the fiery coercion and gropingly reassumes the ancient ways that have
come down from time immemorial....

Even to the words I used. Where did they come from, the words that cut
him like a lash, whipped up his desire, and then fell on his face like
drops of ice water?

I was ashamed. I straightened my hair and left the room. How was it
nothing warned me that I must be on my guard against the man alongside
of whom I had been working daily? Had I been blind? I tried to extract
something significant from my recollections ... but no....

I am going to leave him soon, and I must speak to him.

His disappointment gives him a humanizing air of meekness. It inclines
me to him. You feel intensely that other doors are open and, if you
wanted to, you could knock and gain admittance.

This grim laconic man, whose ways are confined to the ways of command,
who has been sterilized and handcuffed by the barren power which money
confers, looks at me intently with eyes raised like a child's. Women are
wrong in supposing that a man forsakes them when he renounces his
desire.

I speak to him disconnectedly, but I am leading up to what I want to
say. And he moves his face a little forward and still a little further
forward; it's as though he were drawing closer, step by step, step by
step. And everything external about me is effaced by degrees, my
sunshiny hair, my mouth, my body present but concealed, my entire
femininity. An infallible instinct tells me this. He takes in my voice
alone, and is surprised that my voice talks nothing but sense. But he
is going to know if it will talk sense straight to the end, so he
settles himself more comfortably in his armchair, lets his eyebrows
relax, and loses all thought of himself. His logic is being appealed to.

"Now as to your money ... you know if I married you