The Flaw in the Crystal
By
May Sinclair
NEW YORK
E·P·DUTTON & COMPANY
31 West Twenty-Third Street
Copyright, 1912
By May Sinclair
T was Friday, the day he always came, if (so shesafeguarded it) he was to come at all. They had left it that way in thebeginning, that it should be open to him to come or not to come. Theyhad not even settled that it should be Fridays, but it always was, theweek-end being the only time when he could get away; the only time, hehad explained to Agatha Verrall, when getting away excited no remark. Hehad to, or he would have broken down. Agatha called it getting away"from things"; but she knew that there was only one thing, his wifeBella.
To be wedded to a mass of furious and malignant nerves (which was allthat poor Bella was now) simply meant destruction to a man like RodneyLanyon. Rodney's own nerves were not as strong as they had been, afterten years of Bella's. It had been understood for long enough (understoodeven by Bella) that if he couldn't have his weekends he was done for; hecouldn't possibly have stood the torment and the strain of her.
Of course, she didn't know he spent the greater part of them with AgathaVerrall. It was not to be desired that she should know. Her obtusenesshelped them. Even in her younger and saner days she had failed,persistently, to realise any profound and poignant thing that touchedhim; so by the mercy of heaven she had never realised Agatha Verrall.She used to say that she had never seen anything in Agatha, whichamounted, as he once told her, to not seeing Agatha at all. Still lesscould she have compassed any vision of the tie—the extraordinary,intangible, immaterial tie that held them.
Sometimes, at the last moment, his escape to Agatha would proveimpossible; so they had left it further that he was to send her noforewarning; he was to come when and as he could. He could always get aroom in the village inn or at the Farm near by, and in Agatha's house hewould find his place ready for him, the place which had become hisrefuge, his place of peace.
There was no need to prepare her. She was never not prepared. It was asif by her preparedness, by the absence of preliminaries, of adjustmentsand arrangements, he was always there, lodged in the innermost chamber.She had set herself apart; she had swept herself bare and scouredherself clean for him. Clean she had to be; clean from the desire thathe should come; clean, above all, from the thought, the knowledge shenow had, that she could make him come.
For if she had given herself up to that——
But she never had; never since the knowledge came to her; since shediscovered, wonderfully, by a divine accident, that at any moment shecould make him—that she had whatever it was, the power, theuncanny, unaccountable Gift.
She was beginning to see more and more how it worked; how inevitably,how infallibly it worked. She was even a little afraid of it, of what itmight come to mean. It did mean that without his knowledge, separatedas they were and had to be, she could al