Free Tomorrow Is Forever by Gwen Bristow Page B

were married Arthur gave me an experience of ecstasy. If he had lived I might have been disillusioned. But what I’m trying to tell you is that I wasn’t disillusioned, and now I never will be. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
    â€œYes. But you haven’t said whether or not you want to marry me.”
    â€œI do want to. But I’m not sure you’re going to want to marry me. If you don’t want to, say so. You’re too fine and honest to have anything less than the truth from me, or to let me have anything less than that from you. Spratt, when Arthur died something died in me. What I feel for you—it’s strange to call it love, because it’s so different. It’s not adoration that sees no faults. It’s thoughtful and realistic. I like you, I admire you, I have tremendous respect for you. I trust you completely. I’d tell you anything. I know you’ll never fail me. But I can’t give you what I gave Arthur, because I haven’t got it to give. It’s just not there any more.”
    She looked across the room at him, listening steadily in the half-glow of a reading lamp some distance away. She concluded,
    â€œIt would hurt me terribly to lose you. But it would be worse to know I had been less than completely honest with you. There may be another woman who can give you what I can’t, and if that’s what you want, please, please tell me so.”
    She heard a soft, smothered little sound from his direction, and saw to her amazement that Spratt was laughing. He stood up and came over to her.
    â€œMy darling girl, you told me I was honest. I am, and I’m going to prove it. If any woman offered me the sort of total worship you’re talking about, she’d throw me into a panic.”
    He put his hands on her shoulders and squeezed them as he continued, in comradely fashion. “Forgive me for laughing. I wasn’t laughing at you, but at the idea that anybody could possibly think I might want to be adored like that, which you’ll have to admit is ridiculous. Elizabeth, if I may be brutally frank—if that’s what you were when you were a young girl I’m glad you got rid of it before I met you. I want you the way you are.”
    Quite suddenly, she began to laugh too. This way of talking about marriage was so different from the shining rapture with which she and Arthur had talked about it.
    â€œThen you do want me, Spratt?”
    â€œYou bet I do.”
    â€œYou’re not going to be sorry for what’s past?”
    â€œI should say not. You see, Elizabeth, it’s really quite simple. I love you as you are. What you are must be the result of what’s happened to you before. If it had happened differently, you’d have been a different sort of woman now, and I shouldn’t have loved you. It makes sense.”
    â€œYou’re the only man I know,” said Elizabeth, “who always makes sense.”
    They were married soon after that. She had never had reason to be sorry. Spratt had been brilliantly successful in his work, they had their three children, their long unbroken affection, and the peace of mind that came from knowing themselves of supreme importance to each other. It was a good life.

4
    I t was a good life—then what was she doing here, curled up on the chaise-longue in a tight little knot of pain? Elizabeth sat up and looked around the room. A bar of sun had moved a little way across the rug. There on the table was her desk-calendar, open to the page for tomorrow, with. “Kessler to dinner 7:30” scribbled across the bottom. No more than half an hour had passed since she wrote it, but half an hour of her old torture had been enough to make her feel now that she had waked from an intolerable nightmare.
    But she had waked from it. Like its predecessors, this period of recollection had gone as abruptly as it had come. Elizabeth pushed a lock of hair off her forehead and