triangle. It’s a hub, rather, from which radiate several broken and uneven spokes.”
“Broken spokes.” The phrase appealed to her in a tragic sense inordinately out of keeping with its flavour of triteness. But then—he had said so to her before, ages ago—the trite things were the true things. And that’s just what Tom and Herbert and herself were. And the hub? Passion, she supposed, or perhaps a composite illusion of all the various derivatives of love.
“It’s hard to resolve human feelings into the simplicity of A.B.C.s,” she said. “I can’t just say I loved Herbert because I was married to him and because he was the first person I ever loved, or that no matter how many other people there may be later in my life I will always return to him in my heart, just because he was the first person whom I loved, and expect you to understand.” She brushed with elementary strokes through fog in her effort to be explicit. “I love Tom Hollander, too, just as much as I loved Herbert. It isn’t nice, but it’s the truth. Love isn’t a unit, a single emotion tightly wrapped up in one word. It’s a hundred feelings and desires and any number of little human hurts that are longing to be made well again.” A certain bitterness crept into her manner: a bitterness of revolt. “The whole wretched business is too stylized. It’s quite all right to love your father and your mother equally; in fact, it’s held wrong not to—exactly fifty percent of your parental love must go to each. Brotherly love must also be reduced to proportionate fractions. The love for one’s neighbours is presumably scattered into legion. But if a woman announced that this otherwise divisible quality is spent upon more than one single man—”
Her laughter wasn’t very pleasant to hear. Lieutenant Valcour felt a little upset; there was something disturbingly reasonable in her attitude. Was it pure sophistry? Not really. There was a strong element of fact and truth running through it all. It was useless to parade before her the different