The Creators A Comedy
May Sinclair
Paperback
(RareBooksClub.com, Sept. 13, 2013)
Excerpt: ... sure, to know how far the two were going or had gone. Whatever was between them, it was something that Brodrick desired to conceal, to thrust out of her sight, as he had thrust the thing he had held in his hand. Up-stairs overhead, she heard the door of his room opening and shutting. She saw the light from his windows lengthening on the gravel path outside. He was not coming back. She opened the drawer where she divined that it lurked hidden, the thing that was the sign and symbol of their secret. She found lying there, face downwards, a portrait of Jane Holland, a photograph of the painting by Gisborne. She took it in her hand and looked at the queer, half-plain, half-beautiful, wholly fascinating face; and it was as if she looked for the first time on the face of her own passion, dully, stupidly, not knowing it for the thing it was. She had a sudden vision of their passion, Jane's and Brodrick's, as it would be; she saw the transitory, incarnate thing, flushed in the splendour of its moment, triumphant, exultant and alive. She laid the portrait in its drawer again, face downwards, and turned from it. And for a moment she stood there, clutching her breasts with her hands, so that she hurt them, giving pain for intolerable pain. XXXI Now that the thing she was afraid of had become a fact, she told herself that she might have known, that she had known it all the time. As she faced it she realized how terribly afraid she had been. She had had foreknowledge of it from the moment when Jane Holland came first into Brodrick's house. She maintained her policy of silence. It helped her, as if she felt that, by ignoring this thing, by refusing to talk about it, by not admitting that anything so preposterous could be, it did somehow cease to be. She would have been glad if Brodrick's family could have remained unaware of the situation. But Brodrick's family, by the sheer instinct of self-preservation, was awake to everything that concerned it. Every...