III

In books, in poems Jenny read that women had loved before as she loved now. And yet it was hard to believe while love mounted like a lark in her and sang tempestuously against the skies. She was a lark, a song, the very sky, a diver flashing through clear water to bring up armfuls of pearls. She was any gay metaphor that flew into her head when she pulled her curtains on these spring mornings and leaned out with her breast on the warm stone to greet the sparkle of sun on the river and the galahs walking on the dewy lawn under the little white moss-roses shy in their rough calixes. Across the paddocks where sheep were beginning to feed, across the blue hill-distance she would stretch her arms in their long thick cotton nightgown sleeves to Brevis, calling him softly: "Brevis! Brevis!" His name was such music that she felt she could stop saying it.

What did the other woman matter … that poor woman who page 290was dead? She had not kept his love. It was all Jenny's now. He had said it. To the end of time it would be hers. "When we are old," she had said, "when we are old and all this hot burning over, we will still be together, Brevis."

It seemed a solemn thing then, this love, making her feel—not knowing why—the preciousness, the apartness of her womanhood, all womanhood. Secret citadels, all women, she thought, whereof the key is placed by God in one pair of hands alone, as hers in Brevis's hands. This citadel which was Jenny Comyn, with all its pettiness and foolishness, all its salty undercurrent of fears and hates and longings which are the inescapable heritage of all women—how humbly, how rejoicingly would she render it up to Brevis when the time came.

But even now, thought Jenny, happily pulling on white cotton stockings, twisting up the bronze ripples of her hair, I give him enough to shock Charlotte out of her senses…. She went weak all over with shivers of love…. I haven't enough guile, she thought, momentarily frightened…. I let him know that he means everything, everything. He might despise me if he were not Brevis…. Then she felt proudly: There is no need of guile between us two. I wouldn't dishonour him by even a shade of pretence. I wouldn't dishonour myself by it, either.