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And they hadn't been sickly women. It was just that such things might happen to
you –
and you wanted to be pretty sure that you didn't dislike your husband before they began, because if you did you'd jolly well hate the sight of him before they were over!

And then Wondabyne – Jim. It was hard to believe, when you looked at Jim, that you weren't in love with him. You should be. What a pity that you weren't! Perhaps as they said, after marriage—? But by that
time you'd be caught.

She remembered her mother saying once when she was a child: “But darling, just having a lot of red hair doesn't mean that you can make your own rules.”

But she'd made them and she'd stuck to them. Even when she'd begun to discover that a situation you've been controlling may grow and develop and expand until it overwhelms you, till you're as helpless in it as a baby—

Because the love still hadn't come, but it was harder than she'd expected to retreat in good order. The tormented misery of the young man she wasn't in love with had become in the end as strong a tyranny as love itself. She was confused by it, vaguely frightened, desperately sorry for him. But not contrite, not remorseful. Never that. She hadn't pretended. She hadn't promised. She had denied and still denied responsibility.

“I don't love you, Jim.”

“But you will—!”

“Possibly. I don't know.”

And always, though in the end it had become to both of them a kind of torture, she'd reiterated desperately, half-asleep sometimes, with strain and exhaustion:

“I don't love you, I don't love you —”

Because she'd begun, by that time, to know something about love. It was still as mysterious, as unreasonable an emotion as ever, but it had begun to take shape, to solidify, to press down on her like some vast heavy shadow, to drug her mind with a dull weariness, to weight her body with lassitude. Because Bret so obviously disliked her. Because his contempt for her showed so plainly, and was so bitterly unjust. She must have been, she thought now, in a very queer mental state just then. Just as she had tried to fall in love with Jim, so she had tried, struggling helplessly, not to fall in love with Bret. Amazing that she should have recognised it as love, this dull, unpleasant ache, so different from her imagined ecstasies! It wasn't any use. There it was, heavy and leaden and oppressive; She knew well enough its utter hopelessness. But she had, driven by some obscure and not-to-be-denied instinct, cut adrift from Jim with a suddenness and a ruthlessness which surprised herself.

Until—

It
had been an inspiration – that vague memory of a brother of Margery's practising somewhere in one of the eastern suburbs. He'd been helpful and kind and matter-of-fact.

“Can you – well, is the father in a position to marry you?”

“Yes – oh, yes, he could —”

“Well, that's the best thing to do, you know. For the baby's sake.”

“Yes.”

She'd gone out rather stupidly and sat alone for a long time in a park. She'd felt so muddled and tired that she'd actually slept for a little while in the sun with her head falling back against a tree behind the seat. And when she'd awakened there was a woman at the other end staring at her curiously.

“You all right?”

“Oh, yes – yes, thank you, I'm quite all right.”

And suddenly she was. Not that the muddle and the misery were gone, but that she saw her way through them with clearness and decision. It wasn't any use
blaming her theories; they'd been sound enough, and they had actually warned her. She could see the very sentence standing out at the bottom of a left-hand page:
“No method is 100 per cent. safe.”
Well, she'd been the hundredth. She'd taken a gamble and lost and the time was come for forfeits. No one, except possibly Mother, would believe that in marrying Jim she would be taking, for the child's sake, what was to her incomparably the harder way out. But there it was. If there was any suffering to be done it was only fair that the child shouldn't do it. So she'd stood up and straightened her hat, and gone off to ring up Jim—

A funny hot day, restless, feverish. When she'd opened the door of the flat there'd been a smell of faded flowers, and she wondered how long they would have stayed there if she hadn't had to come back. Till the lease was up probably, at the end of the month. Jim wouldn't have come here—

And she'd opened a window and sat at it staring out at the city skyline till she heard him come in. He'd stood at the door looking at her, some hope he couldn't quite subdue burning behind his eyes. It wouldn't, she reflected rather bitterly, have taken a great actress to play then the part which would have smoothed everything out so prettily! She could have done it without a word, and certainly as far as policy went dishonesty would have been the card to play! She hadn't played it – and here she was. And Jim dead, and Bret—

Poor Jim!

She moved suddenly, dropping the matchbox, her face puckered with remembered pain. The long hot afternoon, the droning rattle of trams far below, the
slapping of a blind cord against the window-sill, their two voices—

“Susan, you'll see – this will make you feel different—”

“Perhaps it will, Jim.”

“Susan, don't you hope it's a boy?”

“Yes – no – I – I don't mind much, Jim.”

“This – Susan – this doesn't make you hate me?”

“Jimmy, darling, don't be silly. It wasn't your fault.”

“When shall we be married? To-morrow?”

To-morrow! She'd never known a word to hit like a bludgeon before. To-morrow! And already the daylight fading outside the windows! Weariness and desperation and the panicky feeling of being cornered had swept her to her feet, to snatch up her hat, to fumble in the dusk for her bag. To-morrow! And she'd had a grotesque vision of the few hours between now and then shooting away like a tunnel into some fourth dimension to which she might fly, and hide—

“But, Susan, you're not going—?”

“Yes-I-I must, Jim.”

“No – don't go yet. We haven't decided—”

“Oh, Jim, don't – let me go. It's so hot and I'm so tired. I want to think about it. I'll come back tomorrow. To-morrow afternoon. About three.”

So she'd come back next day. But it wasn't Jim who had met her there—

Millicent said hurriedly:

“Susan, let's go down where Bret is. I'm sure the view's better from the cliff edge. The billy won't boil yet for a few minutes —”

The
child mustn't be allowed, she was thinking anxiously, to stay
too
long among thoughts which painted her face so clearly with unyouthful anguish. So she put the sandwiches back in the hamper and shut the lid down and repeated:

“Come on, darling.”

Susan said, “Ouch! I'm stiff! Give me your hand, Mother,” and pulled herself to her feet. Drew joined them.

“Where's Bret?”

Millicent pointed. “We're just going down to see what he's seeing,” and her husband, slapping a jumper ant from his trouser leg, grunted:

“No more than we can see from here.”

“No-o,” Millicent conceded it regretfully. “But it feels better from the very edge, don't you think?”

They went in single file down the steep track, Susan ahead. Millicent loitered, making difficulties for her feet where none existed. It had suddenly occurred to her that here possibly Susan and Bret might – might talk more clearly see more clearly, feel more clearly – whatever it was they needed—

For evidently during Bret's two days at Ballool they hadn't come any nearer to a solution. That she thought she could understand. They had met then for the first time under totally new conditions. Susan must now seem to Bret, Millicent thought, the third of a series of Susans. First the callous disturber of his brother's peace; second the mother of his brother's child; and now, simply his own wife. Difficult for him, no doubt, to keep up the necessary mental adjustments. And for Susan, unspeakably painful. She must have thought to herself many times in the months since the child's death, that nothing held him to her now but the bare legal contract. That wasn't a pleasant thought for any normal young woman. Susan had grown very quiet on it.

In
that encountering of his uncertainty and her constraint, they couldn't possibly, she thought stopping dead, have done any adjusting at all!

“What is it?” Tom asked behind her.

Here, Millicent pondered hopefully, they were on – on neutral territory. Cut adrift for the moment from the externals of their everyday lives they might see each other, savingly, as individuals unhampered by past happenings. So she said:

“I'm tired and it's too stony. Help me back, Tom.” And she called to Susan:

“Darling, I'm not coming any farther. My shoe pinches.”

Susan stopped. She looked from her parents' already retreating figures to her husband's bent head.

She couldn't, as she'd seen lambs do at Coolami, run after her mother, bleating. So she went on slowly down the hill.

B
RET
looked
up at her. She thought: “He's been remembering too.” So many times during her months at Coolami she'd seen his face wither and close, his eyes blank, opaque, hiding his memories behind them—

And he said, taking his pipe out of his mouth and standing up:

“If you really want a divorce, Susan, it can be arranged.” He didn't look at her.

Heights hadn't ever affected her before. But now she saw the blueness below begin to revolve faster and faster like a whirlpool and the rock she stood on seemed to tilt forward to meet it. She sat down suddenly on the ground and shut her eyes. Bret turned, and thought, troubled, how white her face looked against the cornflour-blue of her flannel frock and the impetuous red of her hair. He asked:

“Have you had your cigarette?” And she answered stumblingly:

“No – I – didn't – I forgot – thanks.”

He lit it for her and felt her cheek against his cupped hands as he held the match. She said presently:

“I don't really want it – but—”

“Yes?”

“I think – in some ways it might be the best thing to do.”

“In what ways?”

“Well – it isn't much good, is it, as things are now?”

He said
with sudden harshness:

“It's utterly impossible as things are now. If we go on we've got to have some – some basis of understanding. I don't only mean that you've got to be my wife in the ordinary sense of the word, but that we must – somehow—” he made a helpless gesture – “clear the air.”

She said nothing, flicking her cigarette-ash off with the tip of her finger. He went on slowly:

“No matter how much we talk there's always – there always seems to be – a constraint – the whole atmosphere's thick with things we're feeling and not saying —”

He stopped, looked at her and asked:

“Isn't it?”

She answered carefully:

“I don't think there's anything I've felt and left unsaid.”

He knocked his pipe out on the rock beside him and considered this. He was inclined to believe she was right. She had been, from the very first of her affair with Jim, quite definite completely honest. As far as it was possible to make herself understood by words she had done so. It was himself who had shirked—

No, not shirked. It had been merely that the obscurity of his feelings had been too much for his powers of self-expression. He hadn't ever had to analyse himself before. He hadn't ever known that such confusion of thought and sensations could be possible to an ordinary and rational man—

Susan said lightly:

“Do you want another declaration from me?”

He turned on her sharply, his first reaction of anger fading into compassion and regret. There was no
denying it, the kid had pluck, and there was a kind of splendour in her uncompromising honesty, disconcerting though it was—

He said, “You know I don't. Let's say the air's thick with things I've felt and left unsaid. It's not that I wouldn't be willing to say them if I thought it would do any good; it's only that I don't know how to – I don't see them clearly enough myself—”

“It all seems pretty hopeless. Perhaps there's nothing for it but the divorce.”

“And yet there isn't much sense in that. You say you don't want it and I certainly don't. Why, then?”

She looked at him for a moment silently, curiously. At last she said:

“Hasn't it ever occurred to you that some day you'll probably fall in love, and then – well, it won't be very convenient to be married – really quite unnecessarily – to some one else.”

He answered shortly:

“I don't seem to be the loving sort. I don't understand it. I don't think I want to.” And added, half-defiantly, “I suppose that sounds brutal.”

She shook her head.

“You can't give what you haven't. I know that.” And he said with sudden fierce resentment:

“Why the hell do you keep on reminding me—? This devilish parallel —”

She said coldly:

“There is a parallel. We won't get anywhere by pretending to forget it.” And she added, stung forward by her temper and the pain of her thwarted love for him, “I don't know why you aren't enjoying its poetic justice.”

He put his
pipe in his pocket and stood up.

“It's no good, Susan.” He looked down blackly at her impassive face and lowered lashes. “We always end up with a row – bickering, hurting each other accidentally or deliberately, insults – other things—”

He paused for a moment. Each of them, in the rough, pebbly ground beneath their eyes, saw a long procession of unlovely incidents – of words forged by their speaker's pain into instruments of torture, of actions twisted with the inspired ingenuity of mental suffering, into veritable nightmares, of kisses like blows and caresses rotten with a taint of cruelty—