i read this letter to the end and looked up, and there was my home about me, a room ruddy-brown and familiar, with the row of old pewter things upon the dresser, the steel engravings of former strattons that came to me from my father, a convex mirror exaggerating my upturned face. and rachel just risen again sat at the other end of the table, a young mother, fragile and tender-eyed. the clash of these two systems of reality was amazing. it was as though i had not been parted from mary for a day, as though all that separation and all that cloud of bitter jealousy had been a mere silence between two people in the same room. indeed it was extraordinarily like that, as if i had been sitting at a desk, imagining myself alone, reading my present life as one reads in a book at a shaded lamp, and then suddenly that silent other had spoken.

and then i looked at the page of my life before me and became again a character in the story.

i met the enquiry in rachel's eyes. "it's a letter from mary justin," i said.

she did not answer for a few moments. she became interested in the flame of the little spirit lamp that kept her coffee hot. she finished what she had to do with that and then remarked, "i thought you two were not to correspond."

"yes," i said, putting the letter down; "that was the understanding."

there was a little interval of silence, and then i got up and went to the fireplace where the bacon and sausages stood upon a trivet.

"i suppose," said rachel, "she wants to hear from you again."

"she thinks that now we have children, and that she has two, we can consider what was past, past and closed and done with, and she wants to hear—about me.... apart from everything else—we were very great friends."

"of course," said rachel with lips a little awry, "of course. you must have been great friends. and it's natural for her to write."

"i suppose," she added, "her husband knows."

"she's told him, she says...."

her eye fell on the letter in my hand for the smallest fraction of a second, and it was as if hastily she snatched away a thought from my observation. i had a moment of illuminating embarrassment. so far we had contrived to do as most young people do when they marry, we had sought to make our lives unreservedly open to one another, we had affected an entire absence of concealments about our movements, our thoughts. if perhaps i had been largely silent to her about mary it was not so much that i sought to hide things from her as that i myself sought to forget. it is one of the things that we learn too late, the impossibility of any such rapid and wilful coalescences of souls. but we had maintained a convention of infinite communism since our marriage; we had shown each other our letters as a matter of course, shared the secrets of our friends, gone everywhere together as far as we possibly could.

i wanted now to give her the letter in my hand to read—and to do so was manifestly impossible. something had arisen between us that made out of our unity two abruptly separated figures masked and veiled. here were things i knew and understood completely and that i could not even describe to rachel. what would she make of mary's "write to me. write to me"? a mere wish to resume.... i would not risk the exposure of mary's mind and heart and unhappiness, to her possible misinterpretation....

that letter fell indeed like a pitiless searchlight into all that region of differences ignored, over which we had built the vaulted convention of our complete mutual understanding. in my memory it seems to me now as though we hung silent for quite a long time over the evasions that were there so abruptly revealed.

then i put the letter into my pocket with a clumsy assumption of carelessness, and knelt down to the fender and sausages.

"it will be curious," i said, "to write to her again.... to tell her about things...."

and then with immense interest, "are these chichester sausages you've got here, rachel, or some new kind?"

rachel roused herself to respond with an equal affectation, and we made an eager conversation about bacon and sausages—for after that startling gleam of divergence we were both anxious to get back to the superficialities of life again.