knew then. She could feel the blood rushing in her brain; the
stabbing click of the typewriter set up little whirling currents that
swamped her thoughts.

Her wet fingers kept slipping from the keys. He came and took her in his
arms. She lay back in his arms, crying. Crying because she was happy,
because she knew.

She remembered now what he had said then. "You must have known. You must
have thought of me. You must have wanted me to take you in my arms." And
her answer. "No. I didn't. I didn't think of it."

And his smile. His unbelieving smile. He thought she was lying. He always
thought people were lying. Women. He thought women always lied about what
they wanted.

The first time. In her Bloomsbury room, one evening, and the compact they
made then, sitting on the edge of the sofa, like children, holding each
other's hands and swearing never to go back on it, never to go back on
themselves or on each other. If it ever had to end, a clean cut. No going
back on that either.

The first night, in the big, gloomy bedroom of the hotel in Glasgow. The
thick, grey daylight oozing in at the window out of the black street; and
Gibson lying on his back, beside her, sleeping, the sheet dragged
sideways across his great chest. His innocent eyelids.

And the morning after; the happiness. All day the queer, exalted feeling
that she was herself, Charlotte Redhead, at last, undeceived and
undeceiving.

The day his wife came into the office. Her unhappy eyes and small,
sharp-pointed face, shrinking into her furs. Her name was Effie.

He had told her in the beginning that he had left off caring for his
wife. They couldn't hurt her; she didn't care enough. She never had
cared. There was another fellow. Effie would be all right.

Yet, after she had seen Effie it had never been the same thing. She
couldn't remember, quite, how it had been.

She could remember the ecstasy, how it would come swinging through you,
making you blind and deaf to impersonal, innocent things while it
lasted. Even then there was always something beyond it, something you
looked for and missed, something you thought would come that never came.
There was something he did. She couldn't remember. That would be one of
the things you wanted to forget. She saw his thick fingers at dessert,
peeling the peaches.

Perhaps his way of calling her "Poor Sharlie?" Things he let out--"I
never thought I could have loved a girl with bobbed hair. A white and
black girl.