“My dear!” he exclaimed in the enjoyment of her presence; she stood staring at him as she removed her wrap, the morn though bright being fresh and cool: “Why do I never do you justice! Why do I half forget! You are marvellously, irresistibly lovely. How do you do it—or how do I fail so?”
She could only answer him with blushes. His bungalow had but two rooms, both on the ground floor, one a studio and the other his living and sleeping room. It was new, built of bricks and unpainted boards. The interior walls were unplastered and undecorated except for three small saucepans hung on hooks, a shelf of dusty volumes, and nails, large rusty nails, projecting everywhere, one holding a discarded collar and a clothes brush. A tall flat cupboard contained a narrow bed to be lowered for sleeping, huge portmanteaus and holdalls reposed in a corner beside a bureau, there was a big brass candle-pan on a chair beside the round stove. While he prepared breakfast the girl walked about the room, making shy replies to his hilarious questions. It was warm in there but to her tidy comfort-loving heart the room was disordered and bare. She stood looking out of the window: the April air was bright but chilly, the grass in thin tufts fluttered and shivered.
“It is very nice,” she said to him once, “but it’s strange and I feel that I ought not to be here.”
“O, never mind where you ought to be,” he cried, pouring out her coffee, “that’s where you are, you suit the place, you brighten and adorn it, it’s your native setting, Kate. No—I know exactly what is running in your mind, you are going to ask if I suffer loneliness here. Well, I don’t. A great art in life is the capacity to extract a flavour from something not obviously flavoured, but here it is all flavour. Come and look at things.”
He rose and led her from egg and toast to the world outside. Long fields of pasture and thicket followed a stream that followed other meadows, soon hidden by the ambulating many folding valleys, and so on to the sea, a hundred miles away. Into his open door were blown, in their season, balls of thistledown, crisp leaves, twigs and dried grass, the reminder, the faint brush, of decay. The airs of wandering winds came in, odours of herb, the fragrance of viewless flowers. The land in some directions was now being furrowed where corn was greenly to thrive, to wave in glimmering gold, to lie in the stook, to pile on giant stack. Horses were trailing a harrow across an upland below the park, the wind was flapping the coats of the drivers, the tails and manes of the horses, and heaving gladly in trees. A boy fired the heaps of squitch whose smoke wore across the land in dense deliberate wreaths. Sportsmen’s guns were sounding from the hollow park.
Kate followed Masterman around his cottage; he seemed to be fascinated by the smoke, the wind, the horses and men.
“Breakfast will be cold.”
How queerly he looked at her before he said: “Yes, of course, breakfast will be getting cold,” and then added, inconsequently: “Flowers are like men and women, they either stare brazenly at the sun or they bend humbly before it, but even the most modest desire the sun.”
When he spoke like that she always felt that the words held a half-hidden, perhaps libidinous, meaning, which she could not understand but only guess at; and she was afraid of her guesses. Full of curious, not to say absurd superstitions about herself and about him, his strange oblique emotions startled her virginal understanding; her desire was to be good, very very good, but to be that she could not but suspect the impulses of most other people, especially the impulses of men. Well, perhaps she was right: the woman who hasn’t any doubts must have many illusions.
He carried a bag of lunch and they walked out into the day. Soon the wind ceased, the brightness grew warm, the warmth was coloured; clouds lolled in the air like tufts of lilac. At the edge of a spinney they sat down under a tree. Boughs of wood blown down by the winter gales were now being hidden by the spring grass. A rabbit, twenty yards away, sat up and watched the couple, a fat grey creature. “Hoi,” cried Kate, and the rabbit hopped away. It could not run very fast, it did not seem much afraid.