“Yes; Billy’s so fond of it! It’s just a tiny place with a station and a post-office and a handful of cottages. We take the two cottages nearest the sea, and let just the woman and her daughter ‘do’ for us. He likes that so much better than going to a ‘resort’ with hotels and esplanades and things.”
“Of course!”
Mrs. Waters gave me a pleased, girlish smile.
“Then, if you do too, you’ll come, won’t you? He didn’t seem sure whether”—she laughed a little—“whether it mightn’t bore you rather; but he made me promise to ask you. Will you come?”
“I should like it very much,” I said sincerely, for, since this revised version of my relations with Mr. Waters, there’s an end of any more complications for the present. It has been worth while sinking the small satisfactions of being “cattish” and making two-edged remarks to my employer. I seem, now, to have all the advantages of being engaged to a quite friendly and easy-to-get-on-with young man, without the horrible disadvantage of feeling it’s a permanency. Yes; I do like having the freedom of a man’s conversation and society without arrière pensée. And it seems to me that the only way to enjoy them is by being officially—that is, nominally, engaged to the man! In any other sort of acquaintanceship there looms the possibility of the “Real” engagement. All the time that the girl and the man are having what might be a jolly and unembarrassed conversation about really interesting things—not Love and nonsense—that possibility is being conjugated between them by some horrid form of Conscience or Self-consciousness. Something like this:
“I might fall in love.”
“Thou mightest fall in love.”
“She might think I was falling in love.”
“He might imagine I wanted him to fall in love.”
“We might both fall in love.”