She knew well what it was. Ever since that moonlight walk he had been besieging her—not with words again, but with every glance of his blue eyes, every turn of his head towards her, every husky, beseeching note of his voice.
Now for a third time he was going to put it into words. She did not know how to check him. It was because she wished—she so wished that she need not.
Again and again already, by night, when she was tossing sleeplessly, by day, when she was talking of other things, she had gone over the question.
Marriage——with that boy.
He was not the first, he would not be the last who had adored a woman old enough to be his mother. And she herself was not the first woman who, past what is considered the age for Love, had received, offered to her as a bouquet, the gathered share of love that could have sufficed a score of young girls.
Had this been always a wrong and an unlovely thing?
As she slipped on her bangles after washing, Mrs. Cartwright found herself thinking, with a half-mutinous, half-deprecating little smile, of some of the greatest love affairs of the world. They stood out in the history of human kind just as the lighthouse yonder towered above the low-rising dunes. Their passions blazed white-hot and rosy-red through the night of centuries; but were they stories of the loves of immature women?
Antony's Cleopatra—how old was she when she romped in the public street to show her defiance of Age and Conventions generally?
How old was Ninon, beloved of lads not one, but two generations after her girlhood?