"If we liked."
"So that you'd be choosing between your career—and me."
"I object to the way of putting it. If my career, as you call it, didn't make you happy, you should have whatever would do the trick."
"I'm afraid you'll think me captious if I say that nothing could do it. If you weren't happy, I couldn't be; and you'd never be happy except as a soldier."
"That trade would be open to me whatever happened."
"In theory, yes; but in practice, if you had a wife who was under a cloud you'd have to go under it, too. That's what it would come to in the working-out."
She stood up from sheer inability to continue sitting still. The piece of embroidery fell on the grass. Ashley smiled at her—a smile that was not wholly forced, because of the thoughts with which she inspired him. Her poise, her courage, the something in her that would have been pride if it had not been nearer to meekness and which he had scarcely called meekness before he felt it to be fortitude, gave him confidence in the future. "She's stunning—by Jove!" It seemed to him that he saw her for the first time. For the first time since he had known her he was less the ambitious military officer seeking a wife who would grace a high position than he was a man in love with a woman. Separating these two elements within himself, he was able to value her qualities, not as adornments to some Home or Colonial Headquarters House, but as of supreme worth for their own sake. "People have only got to see her," he said, inwardly, to which he added aloud:
"I dare say the cloud may not be so threatening, after all; and even if it is, I should go under it with the pluckiest woman in the world."
She acknowledged this with a scarcely visible smile and a slight inclination of the head. "Thank you; I'm foolish enough to like to hear you say it. I think I am plucky—alone. But I shouldn't be if I involved anybody else."
"But if it was some one who could help you?"