Surely enough it looked at first as if she might get from him the succour she needed for life. Regarding the incident at the private view, he had that same day written to her; and this letter, full of love and self-loathing had reached her on the morning of Juley’s funeral. At their next meeting some weeks later a new flower of passion had blossomed between them. Now she longed for him bitterly all the hours they were apart, while Louis on his side laid caution aside in flying to her. But a fearful thing had happened between them. Now when she lay in his arms, there came always a vision of her mother’s face, dying or dead – the heavy frown, the altered mouth, the long, dreadful breath. And when he left her she was cold as earth.

She could hardly bear it. Yet even the inner deathliness of his embraces still seemed better than the final outward rending of losing him. Did she not love him? Her ideals were all faithfulness in love, and her cowardice pointed the same way. Did he not still need her, still keep the power to make her tremble though with a touch, a look? If that went, what was left?

So she was beset on both sides by fear. And she survived from day to day, from week to week, by sheer stiffness of will.

II

Early in October Georgie became the joyful mother of a son.

Even before Juley’s death Joanna had taken to spending much of her time with Georgie. The sisters had sat and sewed together many hours, making baby clothes. And they had spoken of all the things sisters would inevitably speak of on such occasions. The elder had been the more voluble, being, like Aunt Perdy, that kind of talker that needs little more than a listener. But Joanna too had borne her part, and one day she had come very near to a full disclosure about Louis and herself. She would certainly have made it so, had not it been for her continual and very sensitive consciousness of Max in the background. As it was, she left Georgie in no doubt that she had had the misfortune to love a married man and the temerity to make her love the pivot of her life.

Immediately after their mother’s death the two, as was natural, saw still more of each other. Joanna was still able – spasmodically at least – to believe that her world was shaken by the ordinary course of bereavement. Her mother, she told herself, had stood, more than could have been guessed, for the external seemliness and the underlying coherence of things. And now that her mother was gone, these were challenged. But here was Georgie, herself soon to be a mother. Here was Georgie, eloquent and beaming – a very embodiment, if ever there was one, of the affirmation that all was solidly established as before. In Georgie’s company Joanna was able to regard her own deathly knowledge as mere, sickly, grieving fancies. And this was what she frantically sought.