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THE REEF
be of use to. That, I swear to you, was the way it began. The rest
was a moment’s folly . . . a fl ash of madness . . . as such things are.
We’ve never seen each other since . . . ”
Anna was looking at him coldly. “You suffi ciently describe
her in saying that!”
“Yes, if you measure her by conventional standards – which
is what you always declare you never do.”
“Conventional standards? A girl who — ” She was checked
by a sudden rush of almost physical repugnance. Suddenly she
broke out: “I always thought her an adventuress!”
“Always?”
“I don’t mean always . . . but after you came . . . ”
“She’s not an adventuress.”
“You mean that she professes to act on the new theories?
The stuff that awful women rave about on platforms?”
“Oh, I don’t think she pretended to have a theory — ”
“She hadn’t even that excuse?”
“She had the excuse of her loneliness, her unhappiness – of
miseries and humiliations that a woman like you can’t even
guess. She had nothing to look back to but indifference or unkindness – nothing to look forward to but anxiety. She saw
I was sorry for her and it touched her. She made too much of
it – she exaggerated it. I ought to have seen the danger, but
I didn’t. There’s no possible excuse for what I did.”
Anna listened to him in speechless misery. Every word
he spoke threw back a disintegrating light on their own
past. He had come to her with an open face and a clear conscience – come to her from this! If his security was the security of falsehood it was horrible; if it meant that he had forgot-
301
EDITH WHARTON
ten, it was worse. She would have liked to stop her ears, to close
her eyes, to shut out every sight and sound and suggestion of
a world in which such things could be; and at the same time
she was tormented by the desire to know more, to understand
better, to feel herself less ignorant and inexpert in matters
which made so much of the stuff of human experience. What
did he mean by “a moment’s folly, a fl ash of madness”? How
did people enter on such adventures, how pass out of them
without more visible traces of their havoc? Her imagination
recoiled from the vision of a sudden debasing familiarity: it
seemed to her that her thoughts would never again be pure . . .
“I swear to you,” she heard Darrow saying, “it was simply
that, and nothing more.”
She wondered at his composure, his competence, at his
knowing so exactly what to say. No doubt men often had to
make such explanations: they had the formulas by heart . . .
A leaden lassitude descended on her. She passed from fl ame
and torment into a colourless cold world where everything
surrounding her seemed equally indifferent and remote. For
a moment she simply ceased to feel.
She became aware that Darrow was waiting for her to speak,
and she made an effort to represent to herself the meaning of
what he had just said; but her mind was as blank as a blurred
mirror. Finally she brought out: “I don’t think I understand
what you’ve told me.”
“No; you don’t understand,” he returned with sudden bitterness; and on his lips the charge of incomprehension seemed
an offense to her.
“I don’t want to – about such things!”
302
THE REEF
He answered almost harshly: “Don’t be afraid . . . you never
will . . . ” and for an instant they faced each other like enemies.
Then the tears swelled in her throat at his reproach.
“You mean I don’t feel things – I’m too hard?”
“No: you’re too high . . . too fi ne . . . such things are too
far from you.”
He paused, as if conscious of the futility of going on with
whatever he had meant to say, and again, for a short space, they
confronted each other, no longer as enemies – so it seemed to
her – but as beings of different language who had forgotten
the few words they had learned of each other’s speech.
Darrow broke the silence. “It’s best, on all accounts, that
I should stay till tomorrow; but I needn’t intrude on you;
we needn’t meet again alone. I only want to be sure I know
your wishes.” He spoke the short sentences in a level voice,
as though he were summing up the results of a business
conference.
Anna looked at him vaguely. “My wishes?”
“As to Owen — ”
At that she started. “They must never meet again!”
“It’s not likely they will. What I meant was, that it depends on you to spare him . . . ”
She answered steadily: “He shall never know,” and after
another interval Darrow said: “This is good-bye, then.”
At the word she seemed to understand for the fi rst time
whither the fl ying moments had been leading them. Resentment and indignation died down, and all her consciousness
resolved itself into the mere visual sense that he was there before her, near enough for her to lift her hand and touch him,
EDITH WHARTON
and that in another instant the place where he stood would
be empty.
She felt a mortal weakness, a craven impulse to cry out to
him to stay, a longing to throw herself into his arms, and take
refuge there from the unendurable anguish he had caused
her. Then the vision called up another thought: “I shall never
know what that girl has known . . . ” and the recoil of pride
fl ung her back on the sharp edges of her anguish.
“Good-bye,” she said, in dread lest he should read her face;
and she stood motionless, her head high, while he walked to
the door and went out.
BOOK V
CHAPTER XXX
Anna Leath, three days later, sat in Miss Painter’s drawingroom in the rue de Matignon.
Coming up precipitately that morning from the country,
she had reached Paris at one o’clock and Miss Painter’s landing some ten minutes later. Miss Painter’s mouldy little manservant, dissembling a napkin under his arm, had mildly attempted to oppose her entrance; but Anna, insisting, had gone
straight to the dining-room and surprised her friend – who ate
as furtively as certain animals – over a strange meal of cold mutton and lemonade. Ignoring the embarrassment she caused, she
had set forth the object of her journey, and Miss Painter, always
hatted and booted for action, had immediately hastened out,
leaving her to the solitude of the bare fi reless drawing-room
with its eternal slip-covers and “bowed” shutters.
In this inhospitable obscurity Anna had sat alone for close
upon two hours. Both obscurity and solitude were acceptable to
her, and impatient as she was to hear the result of the errand on
which she had despatched her hostess, she desired still more to
be alone. During her long meditation in a white-swathed
chair before the muffl ed hearth she had been able for the fi rst
time to clear a way through the darkness and confusion of her
thoughts. The way did not go far, and her attempt to trace it
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EDITH WHARTON
was as weak and spasmodic as a convalescent’s fi rst efforts to
pick up the thread of living. She seemed to herself like some
one struggling to rise from a long sickness of which it would
have been so much easier to die. At Givre she had fallen into
a kind of torpor, a deadness of soul traversed by wild fl ashes of
pain; but whether she suffered or whether she was numb, she
seemed equally remote from her real living and doing self.
It was only the discovery – that very morning – of Owen’s
unannounced departure for Paris that had caught her out of
her dream and forced her back to action. The dread of what
this fl ight might imply, and of the consequences that might
result from it, had roused her to the sense of her responsibility, and from the moment when she had resolved to follow her
step-son, and had made her rapid preparations for pursuit, her
mind had begun to work again, feverishly, fi tfully, but still with
something of its normal order. In the train she had been too
agitated, too preoccupied with what might next await her, to
give her thoughts to anything but the turning over of dread
alternatives; but Miss Painter’s imperviousness had steadied
her, and while she waited for the sound of the latch-key she
resolutely returned upon herself.
With respect to her outward course she could at least tell
herself that she had held to her purpose. She had, as people
said, “kept up” during the twenty-four hours preceding George
Darrow’s departure; had gone with a calm face about her usual
business, and even contrived not too obviously to avoid him.
Then, the next day before dawn, from behind the closed shutters where she had kept for half the night her dry-eyed vigil,
308
THE REEF
she had heard him drive off to the train which brought its passengers to Paris in time for the Calais express.
The fact of his taking that train, of his travelling so straight
and far away from her, gave to what had happened the implacable outline of reality. He was gone; he would not come back;
and her life had ended just as she had dreamed it was beginning. She had no doubt, at fi rst, as to the absolute inevitability of this conclusion. The man who had driven away from her
house in the autumn dawn was not the man she had loved;
he was a stranger with whom she had not a single thought in
common. It was terrible, indeed, that he wore the face and
spoke in the voice of her friend, and that, as long as he was
under one roof with her, the mere way in which he moved
and looked could bridge at a stroke the gulf between them.
That, no doubt, was the fault of her exaggerated sensibility to
outward things: she was frightened to see how it enslaved her.
A day or two before she had supposed the sense of honour was
her deepest sentiment: if she had smiled at the conventions of
others it was because they were too trivial, not because they
were too grave. There were certain dishonours with which she
had never dreamed that any pact could be made: she had had
an incorruptible passion for good faith and fairness.
She had supposed that, once Darrow was gone, once she was
safe from the danger of seeing and hearing him, this high devotion
would sustain her. She had believed it would be possible to separate
the image of the man she had thought him from that of the man
he was. She had even foreseen the hour when she might raise
a mournful shrine to the memory of the Darrow she had loved,
without fear that his double’s shadow would desecrate it. But now
309
EDITH WHARTON
she had begun to understand that the two men were really one.
The Darrow she worshipped was inseparable from the Darrow she
abhorred; and the inevitable conclusion was that both must go,
and she be left in the desert of a sorrow without memories . . .
But if the future was thus void, the present was all too full.
Never had blow more complex repercussions; and to remember Owen was to cease to think of herself. What impulse, what
apprehension, had sent him suddenly to Paris? And why had
he thought it needful to conceal his going from her? When
Sophy Viner had left, it had been with the understanding that
he was to await her summons; and it seemed improbable that
he would break his pledge, and seek her without leave, unless his lover’s intuition had warned him of some fresh danger.
Anna recalled how quickly he had read the alarm in her face
when he had rushed back to her sitting-room with the news
that Miss Viner had promised to see him again in Paris. To be
so promptly roused, his suspicions must have been but halfasleep; and since then, no doubt, if she and Darrow had dissembled, so had he. To her proud directness it was degrading to
think that they had been living together like enemies who spy
upon each other’s movements: she felt a desperate longing for
the days which had seemed so dull and narrow, but in which
she had walked with her head high and her eyes unguarded.
She had come up to Paris hardly knowing what peril she
feared, and still less how she could avert it. If Owen meant to
see Miss Viner – and what other object could he have? – they
must already be together, and it was too late to interfere. It had
indeed occurred to Anna that Paris might not be his objective point: that his real purpose in leaving Givre without her
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