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After Carruthers had gone, pensively driving himself back to St. Mawes in the pale spring twilight, Jocelyn, soothed by his agreeable talk and manifest friendliness, and also by the good tea, felt quite different. He no longer wanted to admonish Sally. He didn’t even want to ask her why she had come out of the bedroom. He was ashamed of that; ashamed of having locked her in, degrading her to God knew what level of childishness, of slavery, of, indeed, some pet animal that might stray—in fact, a dog. He shuddered a little, and looked at her deprecatingly, and leaning over the table took her hand and kissed it.
‘Sally,’ he murmured, suddenly for the first time since he grew up, feeling very young,—and how painfully young to be married!
Marriage. It wasn’t just love-making, he thought as he kissed her hand; love-making, and then done with it and get on with your work. It was responsibility constant and lasting, not only for the other life so queerly and suddenly and permanently joined on to one, but also for oneself in a quite new way, a way one had never till then at all considered.
He kissed her hand again.
‘Tea done ’im good,’ thought Sally.
But it was the half hour with one of his own kind, and one who, while definitely charming to him, yet so obviously and with a kind of reverence admired Sally, that had done him good. It had restored him to a condition of tranquillity, and he felt more normal, more really happy—he didn’t count his moments of wild rapture as happiness, because they somehow weren’t—than he had done since the days, now so curiously far away, before he had met her. Carruthers had reassured him. His behaviour to Sally had immensely reassured him. The world was, after all, chiefly decent. It didn’t consist solely of foul-minded Cupps, nor of impudent young men in garages. Just as there were more people in it healthy than sick, so there were more people in it who were appreciative and kindly than there were people who weren’t. Carruthers had known all about him, too. Jocelyn hadn’t credited Oxford with so much intelligent awareness. It was infinitely pleasant, after a fortnight with Sally who, wonderful as she was, uniquely wonderful he freely admitted, yet hadn’t the remotest idea of what he had done and still hoped to do—yes, by God, still hoped to do. Why not? Why chuck Cambridge after all? Why not face it with Sally, and train her who was, he knew, most obedient and only needing showing, to behave in such a way that no one, if she lived there, would dare make himself a nuisance?—it was infinitely pleasant after this to have been with somebody who knew all about him. He hadn’t got very far, of course, in his work; nobody knew that better than himself. But it had been a good enough beginning for Carruthers and Oxford to have heard of him. And the desire to go on, to proceed along the glorious path, came back to him in a mighty flood as he sat in the Thistle and Goat’s drawing-room, with that other desire appeased and seeming to be getting ready to fall into its proper place.
If Sally too could be got into her proper place, mightn’t life even yet be a triumph?