Letty Fox by Christina Stead Page B

affairs! If I am born in this world only to protect her noble heart from pain, you see! I am a happy man.
    â€œI am not madly in love at all. I know this woman and I just compare her with others. What is the use of trying to convince you? It isn’t sex, you know. Sex—any couple can mate—what of it? Dogs can mate. It is something to live for. There’s nothing wrong with my desires physically. But my heart thirsts so. Yet people laugh—”
    â€œIt’s another frame of reference,” said Solander.
    â€œCan you imagine a woman that at her age is grandly ardent, simple and yielding?” continued Uncle Philip. “She is proud and fiery, and yet she has a sweet, modest, reluctant yielding, a shamefacedness. She says she was not always like that; her husband, that schoolteacher she was married to, made her like that. That is what she says because she’s generous. She had to fight as a young girl. Such natures are not welcomed and people make game of them, or tread on them. They learn to be tough. It takes years to give them back their rich, generous simplicity. You see, she says he did that for her; and she doesn’t hate him, she loves him; but he does not understand her now. He thinks she’s foolish, childish. He says to her it’s a sign of age because she goes with a man younger than herself. As if age counted in these things! There are tragedies, of course, between people of different generations when they love. However, people don’t care to talk about the happy affairs in such cases. They only talk about the tragedies. Because it shocks them, I don’t know why.”
    â€œThey don’t talk much about love at all, that’s the simple truth,” said my father.
    â€œI have never loved,” said P. Hogg.
    â€œAnd so it doesn’t exist,” Solander laughed.
    â€œI don’t say that; no, evidently it exists,” said P. Hogg.
    â€œI can testify that it exists,” said my father.
    The whole truth about my father was out by this, for Uncle Philip had put himself out to let us know: he considered it beautiful, even though he liked my mother. My father loved a young dark serious girl, with large eyes, called Persia. My grandmothers were thrown off balance by this happening—such a well-conducted man as my father! But Grandmother Morgan was too busy with her properties, her love affairs, and the dangerous beauty of her youngest daughter Phyllis, to bother about her daughter Mathilde; and Grandmother Fox was a timid lady who could scarcely admit that even childbirth existed, let alone divorce, sexual vagrancy. She never dared ask her son about his behavior. All she could do was to look at me and sigh, pull big eyes when she was with her son and sigh. How dared she ask questions about sexual matters? The mere thought, in private, made her blush.
    â€œDon’t you think about the others?” said Hogg.
    â€œThat’s another thing you learn—to live for the day. When you’ve caught a big fish, you live for that day.” Philip Morgan laughed.
    â€œI mean, your other girl friends. Your life hasn’t been a desert up to now, in spite of that story you tell them.”
    Philip sounded flustered, “What story?”
    â€œYour formula: ‘Life was a desert but you are my oasis.’ ”
    Philip laughed like the winding of Roland’s trumpet distant in Roncesvalles; then he murmured, “Who told you that?”
    â€œEleanor Blackfield.”
    â€œShe was a nice girl,” said Philip, in a lower voice.
    â€œDon’t you think of the trouble you made?” asked Hogg.
    â€œThey’re all neurotics, they’d get into trouble anyhow.”
    â€œPerhaps they love you,” said my father.
    â€œNo, I only love one woman.”
    â€œBut—Eleanor Blackfield, for instance,” said Solander.
    â€œThat’s neurosis. They’re repressed and then— But now I’m