‘You intend to be away till to-morrow? Is that your meaning, Gaston?’
‘Till to-morrow, certainly. When can one get away from a mess-dinner before midnight! This time, however, you will not be disturbed, my love. Instead of being roused at an unearthly hour of the morning, you will have your rest unbroken. And you want it, Dinah. Do you know that you are losing your colour, that your eyes are beginning to look dark under the lower lid?’
‘And your evening dress? When you breakfast with Colonel de Gourmet, I generally see nothing of you for the remainder of the day.’
‘My dearest girl, you are all thoughtfulness. Just put together what I shall want in my Gladstone. Miller will see that it goes up to the Fort. And do not keep in your own room, Dinah, and do eat dinner, instead of drinking tea, for my sake.’
By this time Gaston Arbuthnot had progressed some paces along the descending path. Dinah had no choice but to return to the hotel, then settle down, after a scarcely tasted breakfast, to one of her accustomed days of loneliness and embroidery.
Alas! the mere mechanical business of cross-stitch irritated her cruelly. This conscientious sorting of coloured wools, this rigid counting of threads, this hour-long stabbing of a needle in and out of canvas—what good could be the outcome of it? She asked herself the question ere her needle had taken a dozen stitches. What ill has been lessened, thought Dinah, what pleasure added to mortal lot by all the collective pieces of wool-work which patient, dull-hearted women have executed since the world began?
A keen, eager soul like Marjorie Bartrand’s would have settled the question, unhelped, and finally, at about the age of eleven. Dinah’s nature was essentially averse to revolution. She was slow at imagining new futures, and an existence without cross-stitch would, to her, have been the newest of all possible existences. But pain was beginning to sting her, not only into rebellion, but into quickened intelligence. It was not merely the emptiness of wool-work as an occupation that overcame her. She felt humiliated by its want of art. She pictured the tasteless adornment of Aunt Susan’s humble parlour rendered a few shades more tasteless by the added pinks and greens and reds of her own laborious ottoman! She divined, as she had never done before, what her ‘pieces’ must seem like in the fastidious sight of Gaston and of his friends.
With a sensation of disgust poor Dinah pinned a screen of silver paper over her forget-me-nots and auriculas. Then she took Geoffrey’s volume of Browning from the table. Seating herself in a corner of the room farthest away from the fresh air, the enlivening summer odours and warmth which floated in from the garden, she began to read.
The book opened at ‘James Lee’s Wife.’
During the past twenty-fours hours she had pondered deeply over the wisdom to be gained at the hands of polite society. What was the Langrune expedition for her but an experiment, a lesson whereby she might acquire the manners, the temper, the ideas (if such existed) of her husband’s world! The experiment had taught her much. Yet, I think, ‘James Lee’s Wife,’ read and re-read, through tears, had taught her more. She had discovered no transcendental meaning, as a learned Browning Society might have done, in Browning’s words. But she was growing to look at life otherwise than by her own small rushlight of personal experience, to know that it was no new thing for a man’s fancy to die while his wife’s love burned at white heat, to realise that there was a wide world lying outside her own narrow embittered lot—a world to whose beauty and whose teachings the most self-engrossed soul must open itself or perish.