"I daren't trust my feelings. I can't. There
are too many of them. They won't work the
same way. They're all fighting against each
other."
"Then let them fight it out, and let the
strongest win."
There had evidently been some tacit division of
labour, by which she did all the thinking and all
the work while he did the talking. Thus, to
continue Durant's line of argument, the Colonel's
comfort was secured to him without an effort on
his part (otherwise, it would not have been comfort);...
p64
What had he ever given her beyond some infinitesimal portion of his valuable
time, at the most some luminous hour of insight, or perhaps a little superfluous piece of
good advice that was of no possible use to himself? For these things she had given herself
given herself away. How ludicrously pathetic
some women are! You do them some kindness
on an afternoon when you have nothing better
to do, and they reward you with the devotion of
eternity; for they have no sense of proportion.
The awkward thing is that it lays you under
an eternal obligation to do something or other
for them, you don't know exactly what; an
intolerable position for a nice man.
p68
"And why not get away?" he asked gently." Because I can't do anything like other people,
by bits and halves. If I once go, I shall never
come back never. There's no use thinking
about it. I've thought about it till I could
have gone mad." She faced him bravely.
"Mr. Durant, if you ever want a thing as
badly as I want that, let me tell you that it will
be simpler and easier to give it up altogether,
for always, than to keep on looking at it and
touching it and letting it go."
"Do you apply that principle to everything?"
"Nearly everything."
"H'm. Uncompromising. Yet I doubt if you
are wise."
"Wise ? Isn't it wiser to stand a little hunger
than to go back to starvation after luxury?"
"Oh, of course; at that rate you can bring
your soul down to a straw a day. But in the
end, you know, it dies."
"If it comes to that, mine was dead ages ago,
and buried quite decently too. I think we won't
dig it up again; by this time it might not look
pretty."
At any other time she would have alienated
his sympathy by that nasty speech; it was the
sort of thing he hated women to say. But he
forgave her because of her evident sincerity.
She dried her eyes and left him to his own
reflections.
So this was Frida Tancred? And he had
thought of her as the Colonel's daughter, a
poor creature, subdued to the tyranny of habit.
Habit indeed! She had never known even that
comparative calm. It was not habit that had
bound her to that dreadful old man, who was
the father of her body, but with whom her
soul recognized no kinship. Her life must have
been an agony of self-renunciation, an eternal
effort not to be. p82
She looked like a woman recovering from a
severe illness, she suffered relapse after relapse,
she went about in a flush and fever of convalescence; it was a struggle for health under
desperate conditions, the agony of a strong constitution still battling with the atmosphere that
poisoned it, recovery simulating disease, disease
counterfeiting recovery. p105
"I am not in love."
She spoke in the tone of one stating an
extremely uninteresting fact.
"You are in love, Frida. You're in love
with life, and life won't have anything to do
with you-; it's thrown you over, and a beastly
shame, too! You're simply dying for love of it,
my sweetheart."
Frida did not deny the accusation.
p107
"Because she can't trust her motives, trust
herself. I never saw a woman fight so shy of
herself."
"Then that's what she was thinking of
when she said she was afraid of her own
feelings."
p114
"I wasn't talking about nature. I want to
know what you are going to make of your
life."
"There you are again. Why should I make
anything of it? You talk as if life were so
much raw material to be worked into some-
thing that it isn't. To my mind it's beautiful
enough as it is. I should spoil it if I tried to
make anything of it."
He looked at her and he understood. He was
a man of talent, some said of genius, but in
her there was something greater than that; it
was the genius of temperament, an infinite
capacity for taking pleasures. To her, life was
more than mere raw material, it came finished
to her hands, because it had lived a long life
in her soul. Her dream had tallied.
p161
She went on dreamily, as if speaking more to
herself than him. "To have power over your
life to do what you like with it take it up or
throw it down, to fling it away if that seems the
best thing to do. You're not fit to take up your
life if you haven't the strength to put it down
too."
p181
He, Maurice Durant, was as she had said
a part of that world, but he was not the whole ;
he was not even the half, that half which for
most women is more than the whole. From the
first he had been to her the symbol of a reality
greater than himself; she loved not him, but
the world in him. And thus her love like his
own art had missed the touch of greatness.
It was neither the joy nor the tragedy of her
life, but its one illuminating episode; or rather,
it was the lyrical prologue to the grand drama
of existence.
He did her justice. It was not that she was
changeable or capricious, or that her love was
weak; on the contrary, its very nature was to
grow out of all bounds of sex and mood and
circumstance. Its progress had been from
Maurice Durant outward; from Maurice, as the
innermost kernel and heart of the world, to the
dim verge, the uttermost margin of the world;
and that by a million radiating paths. It was
not that she left Maurice behind her, for all
those million paths led back to him, the man
was the centre of her universe; but then the
centre is infinitely small compared with the circumference. He saw himself diminished to a
mathematical point in this cosmopolitan's cosmos.
For Frida he had ceased to have any objective
existence, he was an intellectual quantity, what
the Colonel would have called an abstraction.
There was nothing for him to do but to accept
the transcendent position.
Thus through all the tension of his soul, his
intellect still struggled for comprehension.
p191
She had shown him the vanity of the
sensuous aspect, she had forced him to love the
intangible, the unseen, till he had almost come
to believe that it was all he loved. The woman
lived for him in her divine form, as his imagination had first seen her, as an Idea, an eternal
dream.
p194
She had loved the world, the mystic maddening
beauty of it, the divine darkness and glory of it.
She had taken to her heart the rapture and the
pain of it. She had stretched out her hands to
the unexplored, to the unchanged and changing,
the many-faced, incomprehensible, finite, infinite
Whole.
And she had flung it all up; for what?
For a 'rickshaw coolie's life? Or for something yet beyond?
p199
May Sinclair - Two Sides of a Question (1901)