Aaron's rod

.
i 9 o
AARON'S ROD
a low way. Such shame, such shame! But he only smiled
carelessly now, and asked her what she wanted. She had
asked for all she got. That he reiterated. And that was all
he would do.
Terrible was, that she found even his smile of insolent indifference
half-beautiful. Oh, bitter chain to bear! But she
summoned up all her strange woman's will. She fought against
his fascination, the fascination he exerted over her. With
fearful efforts of will she fought against it, and mastered it.
And then, suddenly, horror and agony of it, up it would rush
in her again, her unbearable desire for him, the longing for
his contact, his quality of beauty.
That was a cross hard to bear. Yet even that she bore.
And schooled herself into a fretful, petulant manner of indifference.
Her odd, whimsical petulance hid a will which
I he, and he alone, knew to be stronger than steel, strong as
a diabolical, cold, grey snake that presses and presses and
cannot relax: nay, cannot relax. She became the same as he.
Even in her moments of most passionate desire for him, the
cold and snake-like tension of her will never relaxed, and the
cold, snake-like eye of her intention never closed.
So, till it reached a deadlock. Each will was wound tense,
and so fixed. Fixed! There was neither any relaxing or
any increase of pressure. Fixed. Hard like a numbness, a
grip that was solidifying and turning to stone.
He realised, somehow, that at this terrible passive game
of fixed tension she would beat him. Her fixed female soul,
her wound-up female will would solidify into stone whereas
his must break. In him something must break. It was a
cold and fatal deadlock, profitless. A life-automatism of fixed
tension that suddenly, in him, did break. His will flew loose
in a recoil: a recoil away from her. He left her, as inev-
itably as a broken spring flies out from its hold.
Not that he was broken. He would not do her even that
credit. He had only flown loose from the old centre-fixture.
His will was still entire and unabated. Only he did not know:
he did not understand. He swung wildly about from place
to place, as if he were broken.