"Unless circumstances absolutely prevent!" she playfully promised for the last time, as she turned away, Arthur following to put her in her carriage.
Joe Halliday drew a long breath. "Well now, girls, how's that for high?"
"Why, her hat alone must have——" Amabel began, with every appearance of meaning to expatiate.
"I wonder what she's really like!" said Marie thoughtfully.
"She's really like an angel—down to the last feather!" Joe declared with an emphasis which overbore contradiction.
[CHAPTER XIII]
SETTLED
Le château qui parle et la femme qui écoute—Bernadette Lisle had begun to be conscious of the truth contained in the proverb, and to recognise where she had made her great mistake. Though Oliver Wyse had told her that he was in love with her, she had allowed him to go on coming to the house as usual; and she had not even explicitly barred the dangerous topic. Little use if she had! To keep him on the other side of the hall-door was really the only way. But, though startled and frightened, she had not been affronted; though rejecting his suit, she had been curious and excited about it. It was a complication indeed; but it cut across a home-life which had not complications of that kind enough, in which nobody catered for her emotions; she had to look somewhere outside for that. A lover makes a woman very interesting to herself. He casts a new light on familiar things; he turns disagreeables into tragedies, routine into slavery, placid affection into neglect. He converts whims into aspirations, freaks into instincts, selfishness into the realisation of self. All this with no willing hypocrisy, not at all meaning to tell her lies. He is simply making her see herself as he sees her, to behold with him her transfiguration.
Oliver Wyse was lucky in that he had more truth on his side than many a lover can boast. Her life was starved of great things; she was in a sense wasted; her youth and beauty, things that pass, were passing with no worthy scope; where the sweetest intimacy should be, there was none; her marriage was a misfit. It could not be denied that she had contrived, in spite of these unpromising facts, to be fairly happy. But that was before her eyes were open, he hinted, before she had looked on the transfiguration, before she knew her true self. She supposed that must be so, though with an obstinate feeling that she might manage to be fairly happy again, if only he and his transfiguration would go away—or if she might just look at it, and wonder, and admire, without being committed to the drastic steps which lovers expect of the transfigurations they have made. Is it absolutely necessary to throw your cap over the mill just because somebody at last really understands and appreciates you? That was a question Bernadette often asked herself—quite fretfully. The action was threatened by so many penalties, spiritual and worldly.