‘You told me you had been engaged. You also gave an opinion as to its being impossible for people, honestly, to love twice.’
‘Most certainly I did. I never cared more for Major Tredennis than I do for this flower I wear—ask Mrs. Arbuthnot! I found courage yesterday to talk to her about that wretched time—and I do care for you,’ looking straight from her heart at her lover. ‘And it is utterly impossible for any woman or any man to love twice.’
‘You think so? I ought to have disagreed with you at once,’ struck in Geff, promptly. ‘I ought to have told you this morning what I hold to be truth.’
‘And this is?’
‘That women and men may love a second time honestly, although once, only, with success.’
She turned away doubtfully, with lowered lids, hesitating a few moments. Then: ‘Love twice? and why not love three, four, five times?’ she questioned, looking up at him with a glance of fire. ‘Why hold at all by constancy, or honour, or good faith? What mystic limitation is there in the number two?’
‘A woman troubled is Heaven’s fairest work spoiled.’
Geoffrey believed as devoutly as do most men in the aphorism. But Marjorie was not a woman, he remembered, only an impetuous girl, with Southern blood in her veins, with the Bartrand pride on her lips, with all sweet and modest and maidenly superstitions in her heart.
He felt he had never loved her more dearly than in this very outburst of unreasoning, childish wrath against himself.
‘I know nothing about three, four, or five times. You persisted, recollect, in making me talk of an uninteresting subject, my own past life, and——’