CHAPTER V

THE PARSON’S PHILOSOPHY

That summer the Parson began to show signs of breaking up.  Judith had been struck by the change in him when she came down, a change less plain to those who were seeing him often, but startlingly distinct to her who had not seen him for so long.  She took up her friendship, that had begun on that evening when he had found her in the church, in the place where it had left off, and this was somewhat to the credit of both, since it transpired that during the past year Judy had been received into the Roman Catholic Church.  Judith was quiet about her religion as she had been about her love.  She had not accepted it in any spirit of there being nothing else left for her now in life, as the vulgar-natured would have supposed had they known her history; neither was it because, most frequent accusation of the ignorant, it appealed to the sensuous side of her.  For ritual she cared as little as the Parson, and by preference she always went to low Mass instead of to a high Mass.  She had found something that for her had been hitherto hidden, and Boase saw it and was glad.  It was noteworthy that it was to him and not to Ishmael she spoke of it.  Georgie, with all her dearness, was almost too prosperous to understand.  Judy radiated an inner joy that Ishmael had not attained and that Georgie had never felt the need of.  That joy had not been won until her feet had trod stranger ways than her friends at Cloom ever imagined.  Often she was seized by a pang of conscience that they should admire her as a creature above everything honest and courageous ... for there was more to know of her now than her relation with Killigrew.  She knew how the single-heartedness of that had absolved her in their eyes; but for what it had plunged her in they would have had less comprehension.  For it was not in a nature so essentially womanly as Judith’s to be content with sex-starvation once passion had been aroused in her, and the irony of it all was that she, who had not for several years awoken to stirred senses with the man she loved, was unable to stifle their urgency after she had left him.

From slight dalliance with first one man and then another, she had progressed to the greater intimacies, ashamed but unfighting.  Till at last the pricking thing had begun to grow fainter and her will stronger and she was able to break away.  She hid the truth and kept up the old tradition of having loved only once, partly because it was true she had not felt actual love again, but partly for vanity’s sake....

It was not that she was vain of the romantic figure she seemed to her friends; it was a more deadly thing than that.  She was vain of the quality of her past love.  Too much had been made of it, and she would have been more than human had she succeeded altogether in escaping the temptation to visualise herself as the tragic survivor of a great passion.  And to this had she come, although her love had been so real....