Alone with him thus beside their little fire her heart was full of dream and content, of peace and love. They two seemed to have come up out of the world to some higher level of life. After the joyous day this solitude of the deep forest was perfect. When the fire had died down to the embers, he circled her with his arms and kissed her. Although her body yielded to his strong embrace her lips were cold, hard, and her eyes answered his passion with a strange, aloof look, as if her soul waited in fear. … She knew what marriage was to be, although she had never listened to the allusions whispered among married women and more experienced girls. Something in the sex side of the relations between men and women had always made her shrink. She was not so much pure in body and soul, as without sex, unborn. She knew the fact of nature, the eternal law of life repeating itself through desire and passion; but she realized it remotely, only in her mind, as some necessary physiological mechanism of living, like perspiration, fatigue, hunger. But it had not spoken in her body, in her soul; she did not feel that it ever could speak to her as it was speaking in the man's lighted eyes, in his lips. So now as always she was cold, tranquil beneath her lover's kisses.
And later on their bed of boughs, with her husband's arms about her, his heart throbbing against her breast, his warm breath covering her neck, she lay still, very still—aloof, fearful of this mystery to be revealed, a little weary, wishing that she were back once more in the car or in her own room at the Farm, for this night, to return on the morrow to her comrade for another joyous, free day.
"My love! … Come to me! … I love you, love you!" …
The passionate tone beat against her ears, yet roused no thrilling response. The trembling voice, the intensity of the worn old words coming from him—it was all like another man suddenly appearing in the guise of one she thought she knew so well! The taut muscles of his powerful arm pressing against her troubled her. She would have fled—why could one be like this! Still she caressed his face and hair, kissing him gently. Oh, yes, she loved him—she was his! He was her husband.' Nevertheless she could not meet him wholly in this inmost intimacy, and her heart was troubled. If he could be content to be her companion, her lover! But this other thing was the male, the something which made all men differ from all women in the crisis of emotion—so she supposed—and must be endured. She lay passive in his arms, less yielding than merely acquiescent, drawn in upon herself to something smaller than she was before. …
When he slept at her side, his head pillowed close to hers on the fragrant fir, she still lay awake, her eyes staring up at the golden stars, still fearful, uncomprehending. At last she was his, as he would have her—wholly his, so she said, seeking comfort—and thus kissing his brow, with a long, wondering sigh she fell asleep by his side.
In the morning they dipped into the cold black lake, and as they paddled back to the camp for breakfast while the first rays of the warm sun shone through the firs in gold bars, she felt like herself once more—a companion ready for a frolic. The next morning Lane insisted on cooking their breakfast, for he was a competent woodsman. She admired the deft way in which he built his little fire and toasted the bacon. In the undress of the woods he showed at his best—self-reliant, capable. There followed a month of lovely days which they spent together from sunrise to starlight, walking, fishing, canoeing, swimming—days of fine companionship when they learned the human quality in each other. He was strong, buoyant, perfectly sure of himself. No emergency could arise where he would be found wanting in the man's part. The man in him she admired—it was what first had attracted her—was proud of it, just as he was proud of her lithe figure, her beauty, her gayety, and her little air of worldliness. She began to assume that this was all of marriage, at least the essential part of it, and that the other, the passionate desire, was something desired by the man and to be avoided by the woman.
They liked their guide, one of those American gypsies, half poacher, half farmer. He kept a wife and family in a shack at the foot of the lake, and Isabelle, with a woman's need for the natural order of life, sought out and made friends with the wild little brood. The woman had been a mill-hand, discovered by the woodsman on a chance visit to the town where she worked, and made his wife, his woman. Not yet thirty, she had had eight children, and another was coming. Freckled, with a few wisps of thin blond hair, her front teeth imperfect, she was an untidy, bedraggled object, used and prematurely aged. Nevertheless the guide seemed attached to her, and when on a Sunday the family went down to the settlement, following the trail through the camp, Isabelle could see him help the woman at the wire fence, carrying on one arm the youngest child, trailing his gun in the other hand.
"He must care for her!" Isabelle remarked.
"Why, of course. Why not?" her husband asked.
"But think—" It was all she could say, not knowing how to put into words the mournful feeling this woman with her brood of young gave her. What joy, what life for herself could such a creature have? Isabelle, her imagination full of comfortable houses with little dinner parties, pretty furniture, books, theatres, charity committees—all that she conceived made up a properly married young woman's life—could not understand the existence of the guide's wife. She was merely the man's woman, a creature to give him children, to cook the food, to keep the fire going. He had the woods, the wild things he hunted; he had, too, his time of drink and rioting; but she was merely his drudge and the instrument of his animal passion. Well, civilization had put a few milestones between herself and Molly Sewall! In the years to come her mind would revert often to this family as she saw it filing down the path to the settlement, the half-clothed children peeping shyly at her, the woman trailing an old shawl from her bent shoulders, the man striding on ahead with his gun and his youngest baby, careless so long as there was a fire, a bit of food, and the forest to roam in. …
So passed these days of their honeymoon, each one perfect, except for the occasional disquieting presence of passion, of unappeasable desire in the man. This male fire was as mysterious, as inexplicable to her as that first night—something to be endured forgivingly, but feared, almost hated for its fierce invasion of her. If her husband could only take her as companion—the deep, deep friend, the first and best for the long journey of life! Perhaps some day that would content him; perhaps this flower of passion came only at first, to be subdued by the work of life. She never dreamed that some day she herself might change, might be waked by passion. And yet she knew that she loved her husband, yearned to give him all that he desired. Taking his face between her hands, she would kiss it gently, tenderly, as a mother might kiss a hot, impulsive child trying to still a restless spirit within.
This mystery of passion! It swept over the man, transfiguring him as the summer storm swept across the little lake, blackening the sky with shadows through which the lightning played fearsomely. She saw this face hot with desire of her, as the face of a stranger—another one than the strong, self-contained man she had married—a face with strange animal and spiritual depths in it, all mixed and vivified. It was the brute, she said to herself, and feared. Brute and God lie close together; but she could not see the God—felt only the fury of the brute.
Like the storm it passed off, leaving him as she loved him, her tender and worshipping husband. It never entered her thought that she might love any man more than she loved him, that perhaps some day she would long for a passion to meet her own heart. She saw now no lack in her cold limbs, her hard lips, her passionless eyes. She was still Diana—long, shapely, muscular. In her heart she loved this Diana self, so aloof from desire!
The last night of their stay in the mountains she revolved all these things in her mind as they lay side by side on their fir couch, he asleep in a deep, dreamless fatigue, she alert and tense after the long day in the spirituous air, the night wind sighing to her from the upper branches of the firs. To-morrow they would start for the West, to begin the prose of life. Suddenly a thought flashed over her that stopped the beat of her pulse—she might already have conceived! She did not wish to escape having children, at least one or two; she knew that it was to be expected, that it was necessary and good. He would want his child and she also, and her father and mother would be made happy by