“Married in Canada. He’s farming.”
“I believe you thought you loved me in the old days.”
“I could tell you some things to prove it.”
“You didn’t do much to prove it at the time. You were a terribly shy and stubborn boy. You left me to do all the courting. I’ve often laughed at the things I did to try and make you kiss me.”
“And that was what I was wanting most to do all the time. D’you know what sent me to the infirmary?”
Then I told her how I had crept out of bed and out of doors in the middle of the night to visit the summer-house.
“What a little beast I was,” she said. “I’m always being a little beast, Dante. That’s the way I’m made. Can’t help it. But I’ll never be like that to you again.”
By the time we got to Sandford it was night. Lamps in the inn were lighted, shining through the trees across the river. We had dinner in the room next to the bar, in an atmosphere of beer and sawdust and tobacco. The windows were open; the singing of water across the weir was accompaniment to our conversation.
She told me the beginning of many things about herself with a strange mixture of frankness and restraint. She spoke of the early days in Italy before her parents died, and of the ordered quiet of her convent life at Tours. After her expulsion from the Red House she had returned to France, and fallen in with the artistic set that had been her father’s in Paris. Her guardian, an old actor, had persuaded her to train for the stage. For a time she had succeeded, but had dropped her profession to go traveling.
“I’m an amateur at living,” she told me; “I’m always chopping and changing. I’ll find what I want some day.”