He was considering this plan with a fresh interest when he was interrupted by the dressing-bell.
[CHAPTER VIII]
ON Monday, after tea, Rosemary sat in her studio and knitted. Not long ago her studio had been the schoolroom, and its name now was little more than an attempt to make the best of its northern aspect. There was an easel in a corner and in a drawer somewhere various sticks of charcoal and tubes of paint, but the room was used chiefly, when she troubled to think of it, as a field for Rosemary's decorative instinct. Just now its walls were cream, its paint dark purple, its furniture very subtly purple and blue. This was an arrangement which gave many opportunities. When Rosemary was feeling brilliant and worldly and successful with life she could put on a rose-coloured dress and dominate the colour scheme, or, if she were restless, she could be ultra-modern and temperamental in orange and dark green. This afternoon she was knitting in the coat and skirt she had worn on her walking-tour and the room, undominated, looked a trifle gloomy. Rosemary always carried knitting on a walking-tour. Landladies who did not think well of young girls tramping about in couples would grow friendly when they saw the knitting-needles. And Rosemary was anxious now to finish what she was doing before she had forgotten all about it.
Anthony, when he came in, found her pulling out a row of stitches. His attention was drawn to this because she would not allow him within reach until the affair of getting them back was safely finished. Then he received his greeting, but Rosemary's mind was with her wool. After a question or two she went back to her knitting. "Bother the thing," she said a minute later, "I'm getting it wrong again!"
Anthony sat down on the hearth-rug and asked her, in a tone that did not call for an answer, why, in that case, she troubled to do it at all. He was slightly annoyed. If it had not been for her idiotic fancy-work he could have sat on the arm of her chair.
Rosemary did not knit with the grace that comes of skill, and now, since she was deeply preoccupied, her air was impersonal and unreceptive. She might have been more glad to see him, Anthony thought. Nevertheless she was lovely, and, he reminded himself, her lack of sentimental pretence was one of the things he most admired in her. It was so unlike Gladys. He had been in love with Gladys before he met Rosemary, and whenever he had said that he felt anything Gladys had always felt it too, only rather more intensely.
At this point Rosemary, the fresh difficulty surmounted, began to amplify her grievance. "Why are one's hands so inadequate?" she said, clicking off a plain easy row. "Why do they go on making mistakes after you understand exactly what to do? It's awfully annoying being beaten by a thing like this knitting—the pattern is perfectly simple." She reached the end of the row and looked across to him, frowning a little. "Why should I care about knitting?" she went on, "I believe being engaged to you is making me womanly, old Tony!"
Anthony, hands round knees, imparted a little information. "You'd have got womanly anyhow," he told her. "It's a way women have. But I don't see why you should waste your time knitting. An intelligent being, say a man, wouldn't be bothering about mistakes, he'd put in the time inventing a knitting-machine. You can prove this if you go into any big shop. The proper department is replete with knitting-machines. And how many men knit? They smoke their pipes and think. But you go tangling up wool with two clumsy needles—I withdraw that if you think it's unkind!"
This row was complicated, and Rosemary did not look up. "Knit two together," he heard her say.
"Listen to me please," he urged. "As for your hands being silly, it's you who are silly to put them to such uses when you might be letting me hold them. Being held is one of the things hands were made for; knitting is not. And having your hands held is one of the things you were made for, and you know it."