A little while passed before he said,—and it was, he felt, with dignity,—“I really don’t know what you mean by that, Marian.”
She had now finished her brushes and had taken up her palette. She began to scrape the edges as she answered,—and her voice was not schooled, it was heavy with its irony and gloom,—“Don’t you? I’m sorry.” “I trust indeed that it doesn’t mean that you are jealous of my friendship for Mrs. Dallas?”
“Friendship? Oh, no; I’m not jealous of any friendship.”
“Of my affection, then; of my love, if you like,” said Rupert. “You know perfectly well what I feel about all that—and I thought you felt it, too. It’s the very centre of my life, of my art; my books turn on it. It’s the thing I have most of all to say to the world. Love isn’t a measured, limited thing; its nature is to grow and give. My love for Mrs. Dallas doesn’t touch your and my relation; it enriches it rather.”
Marian scraped her palette and said nothing. He could see her cheek, the cheek that ran too massively into her neck. Marian’s skin was white and fine; a faint colour now rose to it; a faint colour was, in Marian, a deep blush.
To see her blush like that gave him an odd sensation. It was as if the blush were echoed in his heart; he felt it grow and melt softly, and there drifted through his mind a thought of Mrs. Dallas and of her magic.
Through the studio window, draped with its summer creepers, he could see the two perambulators moored in the shade of the lime tree on the lawn. The babies were having their afternoon sleep. He was very fond of his children; and to feel, now, mingling with the strange, yearning glow, this pause of contemplative fondness, was to feel himself justified anew and anew aggrieved. The glow of tenderness seemed to envelope the babies as well as Mrs. Dallas. And it shut out Marian.
What had she to complain of? Was he not a tender husband and a loving father? Could she suspect his love for Mrs. Dallas—it was she herself who had forced him to use that word—of grossness or vulgarity? It was as high and as pure as his love for her.
His love for Marian had evolved into the perambulators, and this recognition, flitting unseasonably, vexed him with a sense of slight confusion that made him feel more injured than before. It was true that, theoretically, he held views so advanced as to justify, in true, self-dedicating passion, all manifestations. Practice and theory in his young life had been far apart; but the thought of passion, in connection with Mrs. Dallas, had, as it were, been made visible by Marian’s blush; and, slightly swinging his hat, slightly knotting his brows as he looked at the matronly Marian, he groped for some new formulation of his creed, since it was evident that however much he might love Marian it was no longer passion he felt for her. One must perhaps allow that passions could not be contemporaneous; but he had always combated this shackling view.
He stood there, gazing, trying to think it out,—a tall young man, well made yet slightly uncouth, with ruffled, heavy locks and large intent eyes. Something of the look of a not quite purely bred Saint Bernard puppy he had; confiding, young and foolish, with his knotted brow and nose a little overlong. And as he found himself unable to think it out and as Marian still stood silent, scraping, scraping away at the palette in an exasperating fashion, he said,—and now in an openly aggrieved voice,—“I thought you liked her yourself; I thought you quite loved her. You seemed to.”