agnes expected to be followed.
instead of going directly home she made a wide detour, skirting the town, and ascended the west hill obliquely by a path the mill workers used. nobody would think to look for her there.
she meant to enter the grounds by the main gate, defiantly, but she would take her time. as for the consequences,—well, the worse the better. any change would be welcome.
what made the feud with her father unendurable was its monotony. she had meant to fight it out with him alone to the end, with no outside help or interference. that was the true impulse of her nature. but it had begun to be like fighting it out with some colossal stone image. what terrified her was nothing he did, or could do, but the sheer glacial mass of his hostility. no,—not hostility. it was something else. it was a kind of malevolent indifference.
the feud was about nothing. it rested on their mutual obstinacy. a word would deliver her. that word she could not utter, or would not, which is all the same matter.
at school she had been one of ten girls suspected of having taken part in a frolic much more exciting than wicked yet deserving the extreme penalty. the[145] nine denied it. when she was asked she said yes, she had done it. when they asked who the others were she refused to tell. they disciplined her. still she refused. they offered her immunity if she would tell. she refused all the more. they sent for her father. he rashly said he would make her tell, and walked head-on into an impassable wall. after an hour alone with her in the reception room he marched her off, just as she was, saying as he crossed the threshold that her things were to be sent after her. defiance was something he knew little about. disobedience he could not comprehend at all. all the way home he pondered it.
“i understand why you refuse to tell on the others,” he said. “now i waive that. you do not have to tell on them. but you shall tell me you are sorry.”
she wouldn’t. she would say she was wrong; she had broken rules. but she would not say she was sorry, for the reason that she wasn’t. this she explained. that made no difference.
“you shall tell me you are sorry,” he said.
she refused.
“you will,” he said. “when you do you may have your liberty again.”
with that he banished her beyond the white line that had divided the household in her infancy, set a woman to be her keeper, and then apparently forgot her. she sometimes saw him at a distance. he never looked at her.
the girls on whom she would not tell sent her a beautiful present. she sent it back. that was the[146] last of her contacts with the outside world. her mail was cut off. no one was permitted to see her. more than a year had passed in this way. once she sent word she wished to see him. he answered: “if she is sorry she may come.” that ended her overtures. fighting it out with him apparently meant living it out, as her mother did, and that for her was grotesque. besides, in that kind of contest he had the advantage of age. age has all the time there is. youth has neither past nor future,—only the present. the situation was impossible. it could not go on. yet she had found no clear way out. she was too proud to seek refuge with anyone she knew. moreover, she was a minor with no rights of her own. and as for casting herself free upon the wide world,—well, she had not yet come to that desperate thought.
as she ascended the hill a mood that had been rising in her for several days became suddenly intense and exulting. it made her short of breath. the excitement of breaking bounds, of going to the party, of what she did there, now a feeling of utter contempt for all the human values it represented, an emotion of trampling upon her adversaries among whom to her surprise was foremostly john, a sense of unknown power, particularly that voluptuous unconcern with consequences—all these different actions and reactions were as one effect. the cause was the mood. she recognized it. she knew about how long it should last. never before had it been so tormenting. never had she let it possess her entirely. surrendering to it was like a physical experience, fearful and sweet.
[147]
she sat on a stone at the edge of the path, on the lower side, with a wide view of the valley and gave herself up to ecstasy. she was attuned to wonder and understood it. the hymn of night bewitched her. becoming luminous, her thoughts touched objects and subjects alike and returned to her charged with sensation. in the vastness of space, in one’s impulse toward it, in the thrust of the church spire through the black panoramic foliage, in the tearing way the moon sliced his path through the clouds, in the shapes of the clouds, in convexity, concavity, temptation, and selfness, in hereness and thereness, in all that one saw and felt there was one meaning,—and she almost knew what it was. but the thought that excited her to suffocation was the thought of all that had not yet happened to her,—in that same one meaning. the rest of her, most of her in fact, was out there in the void. it was everything that had not happened. it might be anything. whatever it was she embraced it, accepted it unreservedly, consented to it beforehand for the thrill of consenting.
for the first time in her existence she felt knowingly the passion of youth to pierce itself with life.
