Cassandra’s tone was plaintively sentimental, infalliblest tone of all to stir up mischief, never far from the surface, in Marjorie Bartrand’s heart.
‘How should I feel if I were Mrs. Arbuthnot? Wish that I had my precious liberty back, of course, and envy every girl I met hers—the natural feelings, one would hope, of all well-conducted, sensible married women. Ah,’ ejaculated Marjorie, folding her lithe arms, and with darkness like that of a swiftly-gathered thunder-cloud on her Southern face, ‘and to hear people talk as though such things as roaming husbands and weeping wives were necessities, as though the doom of the serpent was laid upon every son and daughter of Adam. A Dieu ne plaise that it should be so! There is one girl,’ striking her breast emphatically, ‘in Her British Majesty’s dominions who will shed tears for no man while she lives!’
‘We will hope so, Marjorie,’ said Cassandra, as she put on her driving gloves. ‘A good many of us have held the same opinions at seventeen, and yet had occasion to modify them later on.’
CHAPTER X ‘THEY SAY——’
But the thunder-shower soon broke, the blue sky showed beyond. Tears, Marjorie Bartrand shed none. What sorrows had she of her own, what sweetheart, philandering or otherwise, to weep for? In regard of Geoffrey’s unknown wife, her brief-lived cynicism shifted, ere Cassandra had been gone an hour, into most genuine, most girl-like pity. After an outburst of temper, however scornful or unjust, there was ever in Marjorie’s heart a pungent and fiery fidelity which led her back, straight as magnet to steel, to her better self.
That she should be disappointed in Geoffrey’s character was, she told herself, inevitable. What is there in any man that one should not, on close acquaintance, be disappointed in him? She had thought, judging from frank and plainly given confidences, that she knew, to a minute, how her tutor’s time was passed here in Guernsey. A little hospital work daily, Geff having met an old college friend in the house surgeon; a little study for his next Cambridge exam.; a good deal of boating; a good many walks round the island; three days a week, his reading with herself at Tintajeux. The picture had been a clear, a pleasant one in Marjorie’s sight. And now matter so alien as this of fashionable fine ladies, midnight domestic scenes, idlers speculating right and left, must come, unwelcome and ugly blots, on the canvas.
She was disappointed in Geoffrey, personally. She felt, with the certainty of her age, that she could not work under him again with the bright unblemished interest of the past days. The change of feeling should be made up, Marjorie determined, by kindness shown to his wife. On Mrs. Arbuthnot she pledged herself to call to-morrow. Meantime, yes, during the forenoon lesson, she would assume a sterner manner towards this recreant husband, this sober-mannered student who, after all one hoped of him, was so little raised at heart above the pitiful vanities of his sex.