She nodded sadly. “Yes, it would be the way it was in New York: I’d always be only just allowing you—neither of us could bear that.—So, if I were to tell you that I admired you—admired you more than any man I ever met—and that I was willing to marry you, you wouldn’t?”
“It wouldn’t be fair—wouldn’t be fair to you, Princess.” His voice trembled. “One day you yourself will want more than that.”
She no longer bargained for terms or set up her stage ambitions as a barrier. His restraint proved to her that she was approaching the crisis at which she must either accept or lose him. It was to postpone this crisis that she took advantage of Mrs. Sheerug’s anxiety to prolong her convalescence.
Towards the end of the second week of her visit Teddy got his car out. One day they ran down to Ware, hoping to find the farm. It was as though the country that they had known had vanished with their childhood.
Now that she began to get about, the glaring contrast between her standards and those of Eden Row became more apparent. Her clothes, the things she talked about, even her dancing way of walking pronounced her different. She began to get restless under the censures which she read in Mrs. Sheerug’s eyes.
“And what wouldn’t she say,” she asked Teddy, “if she knew that I’d smoked a cigarette? I do so want to use a little powder—and I daren’t.”
One afternoon when he called, he found the house in commotion. She was packing. Fluffy had been to see her; after she had gone the pent-up storm of criticisms had burst Something had been said about Vashti—what it was he couldn’t learn. He insisted on seeing her. She came down with her face tear-stained and flushed. They walked out into the garden in silence. Where the shrubbery hid them from the house—the shrubbery in which he had first met Alonzo and Mr. Ooze—they sat down.
“Going?”
“Yes.”
“But do you think you ought to?”