She had her blind agonies, when she wanted him, she wanted
him. But from the moment of his departure, he had become a
visionary thing of her own. All her roused torment and passion
and yearning she turned to him.
She kept a diary, in which she wrote impulsive thoughts.
Seeing the moon in the sky, her own heart surcharged, she went
and wrote: "If I were the moon, I know where I would fall down."
It meant so much to her, that sentence--she put into it
all the anguish of her youth and her young passion and yearning.
She called to him from her heart wherever she went, her limbs
vibrated with anguish towards him wherever she was, the
radiating force of her soul seemed to travel to him, endlessly,
endlessly, and in her soul's own creation, find him.
But who was he, and where did he exist? In her own desire
only.
She received a post-card from him, and she put it in her
bosom. It did not mean much to her, really. The second day, she
lost it, and never even remembered she had had it, till some
days afterwards.
The long weeks went by. There came the constant bad news of
the war. And she felt as if all, outside there in the world,
were a hurt, a hurt against her. And something in her soul
remained cold, apathetic, unchanging.
Her life was always only partial at this time, never did she
live completely. There was the cold, unliving part of her. Yet
she was madly sensitive. She could not bear herself. When a
dirty, red-eyed old woman came begging of her in the street, she
started away as from an unclean thing. And then, when the old
woman shouted acrid insults after her, she winced, her limbs
palpitated with insane torment, she could not bear herself.
Whenever she thought of the red-eyed old woman, a sort of
madness ran in inflammation over her flesh and her brain, she
almost wanted to kill herself.
And in this state, her sexual life flamed into a kind of
disease within her. She was so overwrought and sensitive, that
the mere touch of coarse wool seemed to tear her nerves.