“Willie,” she whispered, and eyes and body seemed incarnate pity.

An unseen presence drew us together.  My mother’s face became resolute, commanding.  I turned to Anna as a child may turn to its nurse.  I put my hands about her strong shoulders, she folded me to her, and my heart gave way.  I buried my face in her breast and clung to her weakly, and burst into a passion of weeping. . . .

She held me with hungry arms.  She whispered to me, “There, there!” as one whispers comfort to a child. . . .  Suddenly she was kissing me.  She kissed me with a hungry intensity of passion, on my cheeks, on my lips.  She kissed me on my lips with lips that were salt with tears.  And I returned her kisses. . . .

Then abruptly we desisted and stood apart—­looking at one another.

Section 4

It seems to me as if the intense memory of Nettie vanished utterly out of my mind at the touch of Anna’s lips.  I loved Anna.

We went to the council of our group—­commune it was then called—­and she was given me in marriage, and within a year she had borne me a son.  We saw much of one another, and talked ourselves very close together.  My faithful friend she became and has been always, and for a time we were passionate lovers.  Always she has loved me and kept my soul full of tender gratitude and love for her; always when we met our hands and eyes clasped in friendly greeting, all through our lives from that hour we have been each other’s secure help and refuge, each other’s ungrudging fastness of help and sweetly frank and open speech. . . .  And after a little while my love and desire for Nettie returned as though it had never faded away.

No one will have a difficulty now in understanding how that could be, but in the evil days of the world malaria, that would have been held to be the most impossible thing.  I should have had to crush that second love out of my thoughts, to have kept it secret from Anna, to have lied about it to all the world.  The old-world theory was there was only one love—­we who float upon a sea of love find that hard to understand.  The whole nature of a man was supposed to go out to the one girl or woman who possessed him, her whole nature to go out to him.  Nothing was left over—­it was a discreditable thing to have any overplus at all.  They formed a secret secluded system of two, two and such children as she bore him.  All other women he was held bound to find no beauty in, no sweetness, no interest; and she likewise, in no other man.  The old-time men and women went apart in couples, into defensive little houses, like beasts into little pits, and in these “homes” they sat down purposing to love, but really coming very soon to jealous watching of this extravagant mutual proprietorship.  All freshness passed very speedily out of their love, out of their conversation, all pride out of their common life.  To permit each other freedom was blank dishonor.  That I and Anna should love, and after our love-journey together, go about our separate lives and dine at the public tables, until the advent of her motherhood, would have seemed a terrible strain upon our unmitigable loyalty.  And that I should have it in me to go on loving Nettie—­who loved in different manner both Verrall and me—­would have outraged the very quintessence of the old convention.