My Puritan ancestors, I suppose, turn in their graves at the very idea that an old woman like me can still feel elated and renewed by an hour with an old flame. But I am sure that we were not meant to marry and then go through life like a horse in blinders. I must remember to ask Cornelius what he feels now about that girl—what was her name? Violet? No, Prudence—and whether he ever sees her. I feel sure that we are meant to love many people in many different ways, beginning with our parents, who cause so much pain because one almost inevitably loves one of them too much. I don’t suppose I shall ever again feel quite what I felt about Hans, the riding master when I was at camp. Or, for that matter, the sehnsucht that inhabited me over Miss Finch, the head of my school. All the time, through them, and so many others, the knowledge of love was growing in me. Eben came at a time when I was in revolt against background, against money—and, of course, he represented adventure, challenge. I know now that I did not choose an easier path with Cornelius. As I look back, it seems to me that we hardly knew each other for the first years of our marriage. Cornelius was so intransigent, knew what he wanted and imposed it on me. During that period I gave up painting seriously forever, and threw myself into causes. Well, it is a long time ago. But isn’t life mysterious? It is surely true that he and I are only harvesting the fifty years of our marriage now, in old age. What was it that each of us withheld before? Perhaps it was just our own weakness that we withheld, out of pride. Both of us had been brought up to be reserved about feeling. And we had not, God knows, had much—or any in my case—experience with loving in a physical sense. It was ten years before I felt any real fulfillment in bed with Cornelius, and by then the children had been born. We never never could have talked about that. It happened in both a physical and metaphysical darkness. How absurd we were!