“But she must have known that he loved her before he told her.”
“Of course. That was what made us all so glad, because there was something left unsaid—something secret and throbbing. It was all gone when once it had been uttered.”
“It oughtn’t to have gone. It ought to have become bigger and better.” He spoke urgently, hoping to hear her agree, “Yes. It ought.”
They were fencing with their problem, discussing it in parables of other people’s lives.
“Why doesn’t she marry him?” he asked. “I expect I’ve been brought up to a different set of standards, so I’m not criticizing; I’m trying to see things from her angle. I’ve been brought up to believe that marriage is what we were all made for; that it’s something gloriously natural and to be hoped for; that to grow old unmarried is to be maimed, especially if you’re a woman. All poetry and religion springs from motherhood; it’s the inspiration of all the biggest painters. I never dreamed that there were people who wilfully kept themselves from loving. I don’t know quite how to express myself. But to see yourself growing up in little children has always seemed to me to be a kind of immortality. There was a thing my mother once said: that marriage is the rampart which the soul flings up to guard itself against calamity. Don’t you think that’s true?”
“You put it beautifully. That’s the man’s view of it.” She smiled broodingly; the plodding of the horse’s steps filled the pause. “When a man asks a woman to marry him, he asks her to give up her freedom. Before she’s married, she has the power; but afterwards—— When a man tells her that he loves her, he really means that he wants to be her master.”
“Not her master.” He had forgotten now that it was Fluffy they were supposed to be discussing; he spoke desperately and his voice trembled. “Women aren’t strong like men. They can’t stand alone and, unless they’re loved, they lose half their world when their beauty’s gone. You say a woman gives up her freedom, but so does a man. They both lose one kind of freedom to get another. What he wants is to be allowed to protect her, to——”
“And what Fluffy wants is the right to fulfill herself,” she interrupted, bringing the argument back to the point from which it started. “My beautiful mother——” There she stopped. Their glances met and dropped. He hadn’t thought of her mother. Everything that he had been saying had been an accusation. “My beautiful mother——” She had said it without anger, as though gently reminding him of the reason for her defense. He felt ashamed; in uttering things that were sacred he had been guilty of brutality. Would the shadow of Vashti always lie between them when he spoke to her of love?
She came to the rescue. “You’ll think I haven’t any ideals; but I have.” She laughed softly. “You men are like boys who make cages. Some one’s told you that if you can put salt on a bird’s tail, you can catch it. Away you go with your cages and the first bird you see, you start saying pretty things to it and trying to creep nearer. It hops away and away through the bushes and you follow, still calling it nice names. Presently it spreads its wings and then, because you can’t reach it, you throw stones at it That’s what Horace is doing to poor little Fluffy. He never ought to have made his cage; if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have got angry.—But we’ve not struck a happy subject, Meester Deek. Tell me, did you miss me much?”
It took one and a half times round the Park to tell her. That she cared to listen was a proof to him that she wasn’t quite as interested in preserving her freedom as she pretended. As he described his anxiety in waiting for her letters, she made her eyes wide and sympathetic. Once or twice she let her hands flutter out to touch him. He didn’t touch hers; it was so important to hide from her how much he was in earnest. He mustn’t do a thing that would startle her.