"Shall you toss up?"
"No--Rochester is coming up from the front to-morrow just for the night,
I am going to dine with him at Larue's--alone, I shall sample him all
the time--I sampled Jim when he was last in London a fortnight ago--"
"You will tell me about it when you have decided, won't you, Nina. You
see I have become a brother, and am interested in the psychological
aspects of things."
"Of course I will"--then she went on meditatively, her rather plaintive
voice low.
"I think all our true feeling is used up, Nicholas--our souls--if we
have souls--are blunted by the war agony. Only our senses still feel.
When Jim looks at me with his attractive blue eyes, and I see the D.S.O.
and the M.C., and his white nice teeth--and how his hair is brushed, and
how well his uniform fits, I have a jolly all-overish sensation--and I
don't much listen to what he is saying--he says lots of love--and I
think I would really like him all the time. Then, when he has gone I
think of other things, and I feel he would not understand a word about
them, and because he isn't there I don't feel the delicious all-overish
sensation, so I rather decide to marry Rochester--there would be such
risk--because when you are married to a man, it is possible to get much
fonder of him. Jim is a year younger than I am--It would be a strain,
perhaps in a year or two--especially if I got fond."
"You had better take the richer," I told her--"Money stands by one, it
is an attraction which even the effects of war never varies or lessens,"
and I could hear that there was bitterness in my voice.
"You are quite right," Nina said, taking no notice of it--"but I don't
want money--I have enough for every possible need, and my boy has his
own. I want something kind and affectionate to live with."
"You want a master--and a slave."
"Yes."
"Nina, when you loved me--what did you want?"
"Just you, Nicholas--just you."
"Well, I am here now, but an eye and a leg gone, and a crooked shoulder,
changes me;--so it is true love--even the emotion of the soul, depends
upon material things--"
Nina thought for a while.
"Perhaps not the emotion of the soul--if we have souls?--but what we
know of love now certainly does. I suppose there are people who can love
with the soul, I am not one of them."