Virginia Woolf: Night and Day

18. CHAPTER XVIII (continued)

"When did you begin to feel this, Katharine?" he said; "for it isn't true to say that you've always felt it. I admit I was unreasonable the first night when you found that your clothes had been left behind. Still, where's the fault in that? I could promise you never to interfere with your clothes again. I admit I was cross when I found you upstairs with Henry. Perhaps I showed it too openly. But that's not unreasonable either when one's engaged. Ask your mother. And now this terrible thing--" He broke off, unable for the moment to proceed any further. "This decision you say you've come to--have you discussed it with any one? Your mother, for example, or Henry?"

"No, no, of course not," she said, stirring the leaves with her hand. "But you don't understand me, William--"

"Help me to understand you--"

"You don't understand, I mean, my real feelings; how could you? I've only now faced them myself. But I haven't got the sort of feeling--love, I mean--I don't know what to call it"--she looked vaguely towards the horizon sunk under mist--"but, anyhow, without it our marriage would be a farce--"

"How a farce?" he asked. "But this kind of analysis is disastrous!" he exclaimed.

"I should have done it before," she said gloomily.

"You make yourself think things you don't think," he continued, becoming demonstrative with his hands, as his manner was. "Believe me, Katharine, before we came here we were perfectly happy. You were full of plans for our house--the chair-covers, don't you remember?--like any other woman who is about to be married. Now, for no reason whatever, you begin to fret about your feeling and about my feeling, with the usual result. I assure you, Katharine, I've been through it all myself. At one time I was always asking myself absurd questions which came to nothing either. What you want, if I may say so, is some occupation to take you out of yourself when this morbid mood comes on. If it hadn't been for my poetry, I assure you, I should often have been very much in the same state myself. To let you into a secret," he continued, with his little chuckle, which now sounded almost assured, "I've often gone home from seeing you in such a state of nerves that I had to force myself to write a page or two before I could get you out of my head. Ask Denham; he'll tell you how he met me one night; he'll tell you what a state he found me in."