As wolves love lambs--so lovers love their loves.
He was wolf, now--she, lamb. Ah, well; no! He was mistaken--she was jaguar, leopard, catamount (he had called her a "silky catamount" in one of his rages), anything but lamb. She could feel her fangs growing. They were no longer little milk-teeth at which he laughed. Some day--if he continued to treat her in this way--some day she would strike and strike with them--deep into some vital part of that which still lived and which had once been love. Yes; it would be better to drag a corpse between them than this fierce, bloated, soulless body that had once been inhabited by love.
But what was it? What had changed him? She had not been unhappy at first, though shocked by a certain violence in his passion for her which had verged on the brutal. In her own impassioned ignorance she had told herself that this must be the man in him. Later, something finer, surer, stronger than reason, convinced her that this was not so--that the blazing bowels of a smelting furnace have nothing in common with the star-sown flame of love. She mused on the origin of the word desire. "_De sidera_"--a turning from the stars. Yes; his back was toward the stars.
A waft of perfume from the rose-geraniums in the window-boxes of a house near which they were passing overcame her with homesickness.
She saw the lawn at "Sweet-Waters," the ring of old acacia trees, the little round, green wooden tables in their midst, covered with pots of mignonette and rose-geranium--herself and Charlotte swinging in the hammocks near-by--the peep of blue mountains through the hedge of box. Oh! to feel Charlotte's arms around her!
She pinched the back of her hand sharply, feeling the tears start. Virginia was far away, like her childhood, like her dead mother, like all the other simple, lovely things that had made life joyous.
How strange it seemed to think that the old, familiar life was going on there just the same! She had given her big chestnut, Hal, to Charlotte, when she married Cecil. Charlotte wrote that she rode him every day. Oh, for a ride through the Virginian fields and woods! Oh, to hear the soft jargon of the darkies--to have if only twenty-four hours of the old, free, simple life!