CHAPTER XII
A WOMAN CALLED ROSE BENNETT
I
THE days that followed were dead—dead in more than any ordinary sense of the word. But perhaps it was Peter who was dead. He moved, ate, drank, even wrote his reviews, slept—he thanked gravely all those who offered him condolences—wrote letters in answer to kind friends. . . .“Dear S——— It was just like you to write so kindly and sympathetically. . . .” And all this time he was without any kind of emotion. He was aware that there was something in the back of his brain that, were it once called upon to awake, might stir him into life again. What it would tell him he did not know, something about love, something intensely sorrowful, something that had occurred very probably to himself. He did not want to live—to think, to feel. Thinking meant pain, meant a sudden penetrating into that room shrouded now by heavy, black curtains but containing, were those curtains drawn, some great, phantasmal horror.
He was dimly aware that the people about him were frightened. Clare, Bobby Galleon, Cardillac. He knew that they would be glad for him to draw those curtains aside and penetrate into that farther room. That was unkind of them. He had no other emotion but that it was unkind of them. Beyond that unkindness, they did not exist.
He was thinner. His shoulders seemed to pierce sharply his clothes; his cheeks were white and hollow, there were dark lines beneath his eyes, dark, grey patches. His legs were not so straight, nor so strong. Moreover his eyes were as though they were covered with a film. Seeing everything they yet saw nothing at all. They passed through the world and were confronted by the heavy, veiling curtains. . . .
This condition lasted for many days. Of all about him
