certain charm, came over them. They knew not what it was, and they were
darkly uneasy. They became morbidly sensitive. Their nerves, strained in
the close watching of the silence, trembled like leaves at the least
unexpected clash of life. Jacqueline was often in tears without any
cause for weeping, and although she tried hard to convince herself of
it, it was not only love that made them flow. After the ardent and
tormented years that had preceded her marriage the sudden stoppage of
her efforts as she attained--attained and passed--her end,--the sudden
futility of any new course of action--and perhaps of all that she had
done in the past,--flung her into a state of confusion, which she could
not understand, so that it appalled and crushed her. She would not allow
that it was so: she attributed it to her nerves, and pretended to laugh
it off: but her laughter was no less uneasy than her tears. She tried
bravely to take up her work again: but as soon as she began she could
not understand how she could ever have taken any interest in such stupid
things, and she flung them aside in disgust. She made an effort to pick
up the threads of her social life once more: but with no better success:
she had committed herself, and she had lost the trick of dealing with
the commonplace people and their commonplace remarks that are inevitable
in life: she thought them grotesque; and she flung back into her
isolation with her husband, and tried hard to persuade herself, as a
result of these unhappy experiences, that there was nothing good in the
world save love. And for a time she seemed really to be more in love
than ever. Olivier, being less passionate and having a greater store of
tenderness, was less susceptible to these apprehensions: only every now
and then he would feel a qualm of uneasiness. Besides, his love was
preserved in some measure by the constraint of his daily occupation, his
work, which was distasteful to him. But as he was highly strung and
sensitive, and everything that happened in the heart of the woman he
loved affected him also, Jacqueline's secret uneasiness infected him.