388
PARTISAN REVIEW
years too late and could not come in innocence? It does not matter
what the cause.
If
it was the first, then the tears can only prove that
sentiment is no substitute for obligation, if the second, then they only
prove that pity of the self is no substitute for wisdom. But she shed the
tears and finally lifted her face to mine with those tears bright in her
large eyes, and even now, though those tears were my ruin, I can–
not wish them unshed, for they testify to the warmth of her heart and
pwve that whatever her sin (and mine) she did not step to it with
a gay foot and with the eyes hard with lust and fleshly cupidity.
"The tears were my ruin, for when she lifted her face to me
some streak of tenderness was mixed into my feelings, and my heart
seemed to flood itself into my bosom to fill that great cavity wherein
it had been leaping. She said, 'Cass'-the first time she had ever ad–
dressed me by my Christian name. 'Yes,' I replied. 'Kiss me,' she
said very simply, 'you can do it now.' So I kissed her. And thereupon
in the blindness of our mortal blood and in the appetite of our hearts
we performed the act. There in that very room with the servants
walking with soft feet somewhere in the house and with the door to
the room open and with her husband expected, and not yet in the
room the darkness of evening. But we were secure in our very reck–
lessness, as though the lustful heart could give forth a cloud of dark–
ness in which we were shrouded, even as Venus once shrouded Aeneas
in a cloud so that he passed unspied among men to approach the
city of Dido. In such cases as ours the very recklessness gives security
a.s
the strength of the desire seems to give the sanction of justice and
righteousness.
"Though she had wept and .had seemed to perform the act in a
sadness and desperation, immediately afterward she spoke cheerfully
to me. She stood in the middle of the room pressing her hair into
place, and I stumblingly ventured some remark about our future, a
remark very vague for my being was still confused, but she respond–
ed, 'Oh, let us not think about it now,' as though I had broached a
subject of no consequence. She promptly summoned a servant and
asked for lights. They were brought and thereupon I inspected her
face to find it fresh and unmarked. When her husband came, she
greeted him familiarly and affectionately, and as I witnessed it my
own heart was wrenched, but not, I must confess, with compunction.
Rather with a violent jealousy. When he spoke to me, so great was my
disturbance that I was sure that my face could but betray it."
So began the second phase of the story of Cass Mastem. All
that year, as before, he was often in the house of Duncan Trice, and
