Virginia Woolf: Night and Day

31. CHAPTER XXXI (continued)

"No," said Katharine. "Except that when one's desperate one has a sort of right. I am desperate. How do I know what's happening to him now? He may do anything. He may wander about the streets all night. Anything may happen to him."

She spoke with a self-abandonment that Mary had never seen in her.

"You know you exaggerate; you're talking nonsense," she said roughly.

"Mary, I must talk--I must tell you--"

"You needn't tell me anything," Mary interrupted her. "Can't I see for myself?"

"No, no," Katharine exclaimed. "It's not that--"

Her look, passing beyond Mary, beyond the verge of the room and out beyond any words that came her way, wildly and passionately, convinced Mary that she, at any rate, could not follow such a glance to its end. She was baffled; she tried to think herself back again into the height of her love for Ralph. Pressing her fingers upon her eyelids, she murmured:

"You forget that I loved him too. I thought I knew him. I DID know him."

And yet, what had she known? She could not remember it any more. She pressed her eyeballs until they struck stars and suns into her darkness. She convinced herself that she was stirring among ashes. She desisted. She was astonished at her discovery. She did not love Ralph any more. She looked back dazed into the room, and her eyes rested upon the table with its lamp-lit papers. The steady radiance seemed for a second to have its counterpart within her; she shut her eyes; she opened them and looked at the lamp again; another love burnt in the place of the old one, or so, in a momentary glance of amazement, she guessed before the revelation was over and the old surroundings asserted themselves. She leant in silence against the mantelpiece.

"There are different ways of loving," she murmured, half to herself, at length.