“Oh, well,” said Lionel, “it’s my father’s old regiment, you know; that makes it awfully different. They know as much about my life as I do myself, and when I don’t get leave, they often come out to me for a month or two. They’re good travelers.”
“They must be simply wonderful!” Estelle said ecstatically. Lionel said nothing. He looked slightly amazed. It seemed so funny that Winn, who hadn’t much use for ecstasy, should have married a so easily ecstatic wife.
“I do envy you,” she said pathetically, “all that background of home companionship. We were brought up so differently. It was not my parents’ fault of course — ” she added rather quickly. Something in Lionel’s expression warned her that he would be unsympathetic to confidences against parents.
“Well, you’ve got Winn,” he said, looking at her with his steadfast encouraging eyes, “you’ve got your background now.” He was prepared to put up with a little ecstasy on this subject, but Estelle looked away from him, her great eyes strangely wistful and absorbed. She was an extraordinary exquisite and pretty little person, like a fairy on a Christmas tree, or a Dresden china shepherdess, not a bit, somehow, like a wife.
“Yes,” she said, twisting her wedding ring round her tiny manicured finger. “But sometimes I am a little anxious about him — I know it’s silly of me.”
Lionel’s shyness fell away from him with disconcerting suddenness. “Why are you anxious?” he demanded. “What do you mean, Mrs. Winn?”
Estelle hesitated, she hadn’t meant to say exactly what her fear was, she only wanted to arouse the young man’s chivalry and to talk in some way that approached intimacy.
Everything must have a beginning, even Petrarch and Laura.
She found Lionel’s eyes fixed upon her with a piercing quality difficult to meet. He obviously wouldn’t understand if she didn’t mean anything — and she hardly knew him well enough to touch on her real difficulties with Winn, those would have to come later.
But she must be anxious about something — she was forced into the rather meager track of her husband’s state of health.