Howat felt a sudden hatred of his companion; but that quickly evaporated; he discovered that she had spread, like a drop of carmine in a goblet of water, through his every nerve.  By God, but she had become himself!  In the space of a breath she was in his blood, in his brain; calling his hands about her, toward her smooth, beautiful arms.  She was the scent in his nostrils, the sound a breeze newly sprung up stirred out of the leaves.  A profound melancholy spread over him, a deep sadness, a conviction of loss.  Ludowika was singing softly: 

“Last Sunday at St. James’s prayers —­dressed in all my whalebone airs.”

He had come on disaster.  The realization flashed through his consciousness and was engulfed in the submerging of his being in the overwhelming, stinging blood that had swept him from his old security.  Yet he had been so detached from the merging influences about him, his organization had been so complete in its isolation, his egotism so developed, that a last trace of his entity lingered sentient, viewing as if from a careened but still tenable deck the general submergence.  His thoughts returned to the automatic operation of the consummation obliterating his person, the inexorable blind movement of the thing in which he had been caught, dragged into the maw of a supreme purpose.  It was, of course, the law of mere procreation which he had before contemptuously recognized and dismissed; a law for animals; but he was no longer entirely an animal.  Already he had considered the possibility of an additional force in the directing of human passion, founded on something beyond the thirst of flesh, founded perhaps on soaring companionships, on—­on—­The condition, the term, he was searching for evaded him.

He thought of the word love; and he was struck by the vast inaccuracy of that large phrase.  It meant, Howat told himself, literally nothing:  what complex feeling Isabel Penny might have for her husband, Caroline’s frank desire for David Forsythe, Myrtle’s meagre emotion, Fanny Gilkan’s sense of Hesa and life’s necessary compromises, his own collapse—­all were alike called love.  It was not only a useless word but a dangerous falsity.  It had without question cloaked immense harm, pretence; it had perpetuated old lies, brought them plausibly, as if in a distinguished and reputable company, out of past superstitions and credulity; the real and the meaningless, the good and the evil, hopelessly confused.

They were seated at supper, four of them only; Isabel and Gilbert Penny, and, opposite him, Ludowika.  Occasionally he would glance at her, surreptitiously; his wrists would pound with an irregular, sultry circulation; longing would harass him like the beating of a club.  She, it seemed to him, grew gayer, younger, more simple, every hour.  Happiness, peace, radiated in her gaze, the gestures of her hands.  Howat wondered at what moment he would destroy it.  Reprehensible.  A moment must come—­soon—­when emotion would level his failing reserve, his falling defences.  He thrilled at the thought of the inevitable disclosure.  Would she fight against it, deny, satirize his tumult; or surrender?  He couldn’t see clearly into that; he didn’t care.  Then he wondered about the premonition of which she had spoken, deciding to ask her to be more explicit.