Secret BreadJesse, F. Tennyson (Fryniwyd Tennyson)
General
Secret Bread
Jesse, F. Tennyson (Fryniwyd Tennyson)
Cornwall (England : County) -- Fiction
He made no demands on her; he would have resented the idea of possessing
a woman as much as that of any woman possessing him--freedom to him was
the salt of every dish. Judy told him sometimes that he made the
marriage service of too great importance, just as much as did the
advocates of it, though in a different way. They thought there ought to
be no love outside it; he thought there could be none within-it. To her
mind, which always went for the essentials and left the trappings alone,
the actual legal compact would not have mattered either way. That was
what her instinct, which in her was as nicely balanced as reason, told
her. But there was a side of her, as was inevitable, which was the child
of her period and upbringing, and that side had never been talked over
by Killigrew's philosophy, with the result that when she gave him
everything she suffered in her conscience as well as in her heart. She
had suffered ever since. Truth was with her a passion, and yet she had
to pretend to the world. She suffered acutely when with girls of her own
age, because she felt unfit to be with them. Often, with Georgie, who
had not half her fineness, she would feel she ought not to be sitting
talking to her or letting her come and stay in the same house. She
suffered sometimes from a morbid wish to tell the world what she really
was. And yet, as she told herself sometimes, if suffering can purge,
surely she was clean enough....
She had never breathed the word "marriage" to Killigrew, who had no
reason for knowing she was not as happy as himself in what was too
spontaneous and delightful even to be called an arrangement. It had been
a "success"; the life they had lived since Judy had let him know he
could take her as he wished. Killigrew would as soon have married as
have installed a woman as his mistress; the freedom of a _union libre_
held no illusions for him. Yet to do him justice it was even more that
he would have hated to have their relationship spoiled by anything so
hard-and-fast. They met as before, went for wonderful holidays together,
and if she knew he was "fitting her in," she was too wonderfully
poignantly happy when with him, too satisfied in every fibre of her
nature, to think of it; while afterwards, if she had allowed herself to
dwell on it--beyond the one or two days of acute suffering that would
follow upon every time--she would have died, in heart and mind, if not
in body, of the pain.
Sometimes, when she was either very happy with him or drowning in the
bitter aftermath, she would lie pretending to herself as a child does.
These imaginings always took the same form, and on this night at
Paradise she began the old childish-womanly game again when she saw
sleep would not come.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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