[CHAPTER IV]
PAMELA
"Pam, I've got something to tell you."
Norman had waited until they were away from the glare of the garden, and the green gloom of the summer woods was all about them, cool and secret and inviting to confidences.
He had not changed much since those days of boyhood, though he was now nearly twenty-five, and the last years of the war had caught him, and taught him some things that he wanted to forget, as well as much that had strengthened the fibre of which he was made. There was a boyish atmosphere about him still. He was tall and slim, and his fair hair, which he tried to keep plastered to his head, was always breaking away from the bounds of its cosmetics and dropping a skein over his forehead. Nothing he had undergone had affected that bright light-hearted charm of his boyhood. He seemed to be rejoicing in his youth and his strength, and in all the world about him, which, in spite of the shadows that still hung over it, he at least found as good as the young men of a generation earlier had found their more untroubled world.
Pamela was very young still, and very pretty. Her hair and her colouring were as fair as Norman's, whom she resembled in a cousinly way. Indeed the resemblances between them were more than superficial. They had the same eager pleasure in whatever life they found about them. They thought alike in most things to which they put their adventurous minds, and to neither of them did it seem odd that Pamela, who had not long since left the schoolroom, and had grown up under the shadow that had dulled and limited the life of her kind, should claim an equality of opinion with Norman, who was six years older, and knew so much more than the generality of young men had ever known before.
One may pause for a moment to note this unexpected attribute of those whose early years of manhood, instead of being passed in the pursuits and interests, educative or otherwise, adapted to their youth, had been given to the war, of which they had borne the ultimate brunt. The years which divide us from it are passing away. The social phenomena of each successive stage of the long struggle, and those that have succeeded it, too familiar to call for much notice at the time, will become blurred, and half forgotten even by those who were part of them; and in after years they will be difficult to gauge. This, among them, is not likely to be seen as it was, when the years have increased, and later generations try to recapture the spirit of the great war: that the young men, and the older men too, who lived through it, and came out of it whole, or not too broken to make what they would of their lives, put it to all effective purposes out of their minds. While it was going on they did the work appointed to them as if it were no more than any other work proper to their years, and pursued their recreations with an added zest. And when at last they were released, they crowded back into the various ways of life open to them, and put it all behind them as just an experience like any other which might have come to them. It could never be forgotten, but it was not to come between them and the life to which they had returned; and the interests of that life were exactly what they would have been if it had never happened.
So Norman Eldridge, who would have gone to a university in the ordinary way, but for the war, was at Cambridge now, three years later than his time, and with his three years of service behind him. His enjoyment of undergraduate life was even greater than it would have been in normal times, for it was a more conscious enjoyment, and he could gauge his opportunities better. Games, in which he excelled, though he had not quite succeeded in gaining his hoped-for Blue for cricket, did not take up even the greater part of his attention. He was a lover of the arts, and found Cambridge a delectable place in which to pursue them. He had plenty of money at his disposal, and social life was open to him at its widest. When term-time was over he could go where he liked, and enjoy himself as he pleased. And at this time he was enjoying himself to the full.
"Pam, I've got something to tell you," he said as they went down into the wood together.
"Is it the real thing this time?" she asked, with a quick smiling glance at his face.