XXXVIII
Walter put away his iron-rimmed spectacles. I had made him promise he would, before we were married. He had rimless pince-nez now, which I liked much better. He had promised me also that he would learn to dance. He had never learned; he had never wanted to learn, he said, but now he did want to, to dance with me. Now for a time I could not dance, and he said he would wait to learn. When the baby was born, he would learn. Then we would both dance.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I shall be a duffer at it; perhaps you will not like to dance with me.’
And I kissed him, and said I would.
I would rather dance with him, I said, than with Hugo; that was what he wanted me to say, I knew, and I believed it when I said it.
In the meantime he tried to teach me Greek. I told him how Hugo had begun once, but we had not got on very far. He said he could teach me better than Hugo.
‘Then we could read things together,’ he said, ‘and you could help me a great deal too, if you would. You could look up things for me in the Museum. You might even learn Syriac, you know; that would be a great help.’
I thought I should like to help him in his work. I tried very hard to learn Greek, but the lessons were more difficult than they had been with Hugo, and Walter got annoyed if I made mistakes. I was afraid of annoying him, and that made me afraid of the lessons.
‘Shall we try the Syriac first?’ I suggested one day, but Walter would not.
‘Greek first,’ he said, ‘was essential’; and so we went on.
In the evenings he took me sometimes to lectures. He belonged to several Archæological Societies who gave lantern lectures in the evening. Walter considered the theatre a luxury. That seemed odd to me at first, but I did not mind, for I was happy, and I wanted to please Walter; I wanted to fit in with his way of life and to leave my own behind me; but one cannot do that, ever, quite successfully, I believe.