She laughed and left him alone.
There was a halcyon week that February, and Sylvia spent every day and all day on the Heath with Arthur. People used to turn and stare after them as they walked arm-in-arm over the vivid green grass.
“I think it’s you they stare at,” Sylvia said. “You look interesting with your high color and dark curly hair. You look rather foreign. Perhaps people think you’re a poet. I read the other day about a poet called Keats who lived in Hampstead and loved a girl called Fanny Brawne. I wish I knew what she looked like. It’s not a very pretty name. Now I’ve got rather a pretty name, I think; though I’m not pretty myself.”
“You’re not exactly pretty,” Arthur agreed. “But I think if I saw you I should turn round to look at you. You’re like a person in a picture. You seem to stand out and to be the most important figure. In paintings that’s because the chief figure is usually so much larger than the others. Well, that’s the impression you give me.”
Speculation upon Sylvia’s personality ceased when they got home; Monkley threatened Arthur in a very abusive way, even going as far as to pick up a stone and fling it through one of the few panes of glass left in the tumble-down greenhouse in order to illustrate the violent methods he proposed to adopt.
The next day, when Sylvia went to fetch Arthur for their usual walk, he made some excuse and was obviously frightened to accompany her.
“What can he do to you?” Sylvia demanded, in scornful displeasure. “The worst he can do is to kill you, and then you’d have died because you wouldn’t surrender. Haven’t you read about martyrs?”
“Of course I’ve read about martyrs,” said Arthur, rather querulously. “But reading about martyrs is very different from being a martyr yourself. You seem to think everybody can be anything you happen to read about. You wouldn’t care to be a martyr, Sylvia.”
“That’s just where you’re wrong,” she loftily declared. “I’d much sooner be a martyr than a coward.”
Arthur winced at her plain speaking. “You don’t care what you say,” was his reproach.