The Light Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

necessity to apologize to Miles for not consulting him—and at the same time there was no real reason for Miles to object, as there might have been if, say, they had been engaged . This sudden, drastic break in their established routine underlined uncomfortably the equivocal position she was in with Miles. In her own mind she belonged to him, and had no existence separate from him. And yet because he had not claimed her, either openly or in private, she had no official standing, even with herself, as his property. She was actually quite free to go to England, quite free to fall in love with somebody there as Virginia had done, if it came to that—except that she preferred to consider herself dedicated to Miles. But the letter she wrote to him now must carry no assumption that he couldn’t get along without her, or would miss her unduly. Likewise, it must not contain any indication of her own growing exasperation, amounting almost to humiliation, that she was so willing and anxious for an understanding between them which he was too indifferent to make concrete.
    By the time she had finished and sealed the final version she was very nearly fit to dispense with Miles voluntarily—tired of a bondage of her own making, tugging crossly at chains which were invisible to everyone but herself—even, apparently, to Miles.
    The letter took Miles by surprise, and roused in him old, uneasy memories. First of all he found himself wishing that the Murrays would stop throwing their money around and leave things alone. And then his fair, well-balanced mind reminded him that Phoebe had a perfect right to go abroad in luxury if she got the chance, especially since she wanted to write novels like Aunt Sue.
    After that, his thoughts lingered unwillingly, unhappily, on Virginia Murray, who was now Virginia Campion. He had, he thought, got used to the idea of never seeing her again. In fact, he preferred never to see her again. Virginia was nothing to him. She had never been anything to him but a bright comet flashing across his calm, studious horizon. She had looked up at him through her dark lashes, smiled at him her closed, curved smile which was always as though she knew something you didn’t know—she had waltzed in the circle of his stiff, careful arm, and chattered to him of her curtsey before the old Queen, and the conquests she had made in London the summer of the Jubilee. He was on his way to Cuba then, and you couldn’t ask a girl to marry you when you might be blown to bits a month later—at least not a girl like Virginia Murray.
    He had returned from Cuba without a wound, but was tormented by that persistent fever and a digestive ailment which came of the food and water he had had on the campaign . Before he had begun to get himself together again Virginia was off once more for England, where she suddenly married Archie Campion without even coming back home first. Miles was at that time a very sick man, with nothing to do but lie about and brood. In normal circumstances he might have got over it in a normal way, and seen for himself that Virginia would never have made a college professor’s wife. As it was, with his health broken and his mind insufficiently occupied, Miles became a blighted being who had loved and lost. Because she was now unattainable, Virginia increased proportionately in desirability until he had convinced himself that she was the only woman in the world, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Circe, Dulcinea, Eurydice—Miles’s love-making, if he had ever got down to it, would have taken a very classical turn.
    So, during a slow and tiresome convalescence with many relapses, Miles came to live more and more in a misty world of his own, nursing the might-have-been, coddling bereavement, dwelling on frustration, courting heartbreak—he was still young enough, at twenty-two, to dramatize a thwarted love,and his dreamy, bookish temperament was favourable to solitary yearnings. He even, at one time and another,