Howards End

Margaret thought, "Helen is a little selfish. I have never behaved like this when there has seemed a chance of her marrying." She said: "But we would still see each other very—often, and you—"
    "It’s not a thing like that," sobbed Helen. And she broke right away and wandered distractedly upwards, stretching her hands towards the view and crying.
    "What’s happened to you?" called Margaret, following through the wind that gathers at sundown on the northern slopes of hills. "But it’s stupid!" And suddenly stupidity seized her, and the immense landscape was blurred. But Helen turned back.
    "I don’t know what’s happened to either of us," said Margaret, wiping her eyes. "We must both have done mad." Then Helen wiped hers, and they even laughed a little.
    "Look here, sit down."
    "All right; I’ll sit down if you’ll sit down."
    "There. (One kiss.) Now, whatever, whatever is the matter?"
    "I do mean what I said. Don’t; it wouldn’t do."
    "Oh, Helen, stop saying 'don’t’! It’s ignorant. It’s as if your head wasn’t out of the slime. 'Don’t' is probably what Mrs. Bast says all the day to Mr. Bast."
    Helen was silent.
    "Well?"
    "Tell me about it first, and meanwhile perhaps I’ll have got my head out of the slime."
    "That’s better. Well, where shall I begin? When I arrived at Waterloo—no, I’ll go back before that, because I’m anxious you should know everything from the first. The 'first' was about ten days ago. It was the day Mr. Bast came to tea and lost his temper. I was defending him, and Mr. Wilcox became jealous about me, however slightly. I thought it was the involuntary thing, which men can’t help any more than we can. You know—at least, I know in my own case—when a man has said to me, 'So–and–so’s a pretty girl,' I am seized with a momentary sourness against So–and–so, and long to tweak her ear. It’s a tiresome feeling, but not an important one, and one easily manages it. But it wasn’t only this in Mr. Wilcox’s case, I gather now."
    "Then you love him?"
    Margaret considered. "It is wonderful knowing that a real man cares for you," she said. "The mere fact of that grows more tremendous. Remember, I’ve known and liked him steadily for nearly three years."
    "But loved him?"
    Margaret peered into her past. It is pleasant to analyse feelings while they are still only feelings, and unembodied in the social fabric. With her arm round Helen, and her eyes shifting over the view, as if this country or that could reveal the secret of her own heart, she meditated honestly, and said, "No."
    "But you will?"
    "Yes," said Margaret, "of that I’m pretty sure. Indeed, I began the moment he spoke to me."
    "And have settled to marry him?"
    "I had, but am wanting a long talk about it now. What is it against him, Helen? You must try and say."
    Helen, in her turn, looked outwards. "It is ever since Paul," she said finally.
    "But what has Mr. Wilcox to do with Paul?"
    "But he was there, they were all there that morning when I came down to breakfast, and saw that Paul was frightened—the man who loved me frightened and all his paraphernalia fallen, so that I knew it was impossible, because personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever, and not this outer life of telegrams and anger."
    She poured the sentence forth in one breath, but her sister understood it, because it touched on thoughts that were familiar between them.
    "That’s foolish. In the first place, I disagree about the outer life. Well, we’ve often argued that. The real point is that there is the widest gulf between my love–making and yours. Yours was romance; mine will be prose. I’m not running it down—a very good kind of prose, but well considered, well thought out. For instance, I know all Mr. Wilcox’s faults. He’s afraid of emotion. He cares too much about success, too little about the past. His sympathy lacks poetry, and so isn’t sympathy really. I’d even say"—she looked at the shining lagoons—"that, spiritually, he’s not as honest as I am. Doesn’t that satisfy you?"
    "No, it doesn’t," said Helen. "It makes me feel worse and worse. You must be mad."
    Margaret made a movement of irritation.
    "I don’t intend him, or any man or any woman, to be all my life—good heavens, no! There are heaps of things in me that he doesn’t, and shall never, understand."
    Thus she spoke before the wedding ceremony and the physical union, before the astonishing glass shade had fallen