The shock once over, Beatrix was not sorry to have her lips opened for her. It is not often that a girl is given the opportunity of explaining that she did not care very much for a man to whom she has been engaged, and who has left her; at least, not to anybody to whom the statement will bring pleasure, and credence.
"Haven't you ever known what calf-love is?" she enquired, beginning by being very hard upon herself.
"Oh, yes, rather. All men do. It's nothing to be ashamed of. Love's a very beautiful thing, you know, and if you like beautiful things you're on the lookout for it from an early age. Sometimes it's the right sort of thing you get hold of, but as you don't know much when you're first attacked you generally don't."
Beatrix felt herself helped. "Well, I suppose girls have it, too," she said. "In books they are generally supposed to begin with a curate."
She felt suddenly rather like crying, she could not have told why; but it was because the love she had given to the man who had been sent away from her and had not come back again, had been a sacred thing, though now it was dead; and its uprooting had left a wound which had not yet become a scar. She was glad to sit down on one of the stone seats of the lily-pond garden, which by this time they had reached.
"You wouldn't do that sort of thing," he said. "I expect until that fellow made love to you, you'd laughed at it all."
This was quite true, and she felt herself lifted by his understanding. It was painful to have loved and to love no longer; but since she did love no longer it was more comforting to her self-respect to believe that her love had been of a lighter quality than she had thought it at the time.
She dropped the ugly idea of calf-love. She could do better than that, on consideration. "I should have been a Marquise you know," she said, "and a very rich and important one. Girls are apt to be bowled over by that sort of thing, you know."
"You wouldn't be, though," he said again with great directness.
This was quite true too. She was flattered, but was not prepared to drop this line entirely. And she believed every word she was saying. "I don't mean that I was on the lookout for a title, in that crude sort of way," she said. "I don't think I'm like that."