he and she were verbally very near: that is unless they were profoundly
interested, TALKING to one another. The amazing, the profound, the
unbelievable thrill there was in passionately talking to some really clever
young man by the hour, resuming day after day for months...this they had
never realized till it happened! The paradisal promise: Thou shalt have men
to talk to!---had never been uttered. It was fulfilled before they knew what
a promise it was.
And if after the roused intimacy of these vivid and soul-enlightened
discussions the sex thing became more or less inevitable, then let it. It
marked the end of a chapter. It had a thrill of its own too: a queer
vibrating thrill inside the body, a final spasm of self-assertion, like the
last word, exciting, and very like the row of asterisks that can be put to
show the end of a paragraph, and a break in the theme.
When the girls came home for the summer holidays of 1913, when Hilda
was twenty and Connie eighteen, their father could see plainly that they had
had the love experience.
L'amour avait possč par lū, as somebody puts it. But he was a man of
experience himself, and let life take its course. As for the mot a nervous
invalid in the last few months of her life, she wanted her girls to be
`free', and to `fulfil themselves'. She herself had never been able to be
altogether herself: it had been denied her. Heaven knows why, for she was a
woman who had her own income and her own way. She blamed her husband. But as
a matter of fact, it was some old impression of authority on her own mind or
soul that she could not get rid of. It had nothing to do with Sir Malcolm,
who left his nervously hostile, high-spirited wife to rule her own roost,
while he went his own way.
So the girls were `free', and went back to Dresden, and their music,
and the university and the young men. They loved their respective young men,
and their respective young men loved them with all the passion of mental
attraction. All the wonderful things the young men thought and expressed and
wrote, they thought and expressed and wrote for the young women. Connie's
young man was musical, Hilda's was technical. But they simply lived for
their young women. In their minds and their mental excitements, that is.
Somewhere else they were a little rebuffed, though they did not know it.
It was obvious in them too that love had gone through them: that is,
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