As he and Terry chugged their way to Mulberry Tree Court he eyed her, sitting beside him. Would he ever get her? If he did, would she prove to be one of his really big things? All men must have thought that their wives would be the really big things in their lives before they married them. How many of them thought that six months after they were married? There was Adair, for instance. But his wife was going to be the big thing—on that he was determined.
And yet, it wasn't very big of Terry to be using him as a stalking-horse for her love for Braithwaite; he felt morally certain that that was what she was doing. She hadn't acknowledged to having seen him, but Tabs felt instinctively that she had seen him. He also felt that within the next twenty-four hours she would be seeing him again. It was
impossible for him to accuse her of clandestine meetings of which he had no proof; at the same time he was distressed by the restraint that was put upon himself. As things were, anything might happen. When it did happen, it would happen suddenly and he would be in a measure to blame.
And here again, in this luncheon with Maisie, he was being made a party to her policy of secrecy. There could be no doubt that Sir Tobias was in ignorance of her continual correspondence with Maisie.
He looked at her. How near she seemed to him and yet in reality what miles away! He could listen to her voice. He could touch her. But he could not foresee a single one of her future actions. She was remote and strange and dear. She had offered to become engaged to him, but she was no part of him. She filled him with discomfort and unrest. For the first time he dared to frame his charge against her. It was in almost the same words as the charge which she herself had brought against Braithwaite. He could love her so that it seemed that if he did not win her, he would never be able to love any other woman; but he could not trust her. He began to question whether she had ever been the woman he had tried to think her. Perhaps she was only a dummy and his imagination had clothed her with affection. He had attributed to her adorable qualities——
When all was said, how little he really knew about her! His need of her fought with his sense of discretion. It was not dignified that a man of his posi
tion and years should allow himself to become a shuttlecock in the hands of her capricious inexperience. Would he ever be able to bridge that gulf of years! Lady Beddow's unhappy criticism haunted him. "He lacks ardor." Perhaps she was right; experience should marry experience and inexperience inexperience.
As they sped down the Brompton Road, they passed the end of Honeymoon Square. In the enclosed garden among spring flowers children were still playing. Scattered here and there, under the thin shade of blossoming trees, he caught glimpses of white prams with their attendant nurses. The little houses—his own among them—stood all a-row, shoulder to shoulder, looking intensely smiling and habitable. His imagination reconjured all the midnights they had witnessed—the home-comings under cover of darkness, the secret endearments of lovers, the muffled laughter. Then he remembered his own dream, which he had planned to share with her. It was intolerable that it should escape conversion into reality.
It seemed little short of marvelous that she should still sit beside him. She should have vanished with the Square. Had he given her a name, he would have called her his lady in heliotrope, for she was dressed in a heliotrope gown, trimmed round the hem and throat with gray opossum and topped with a little close-fitting turban of color and fur to match. She looked so dainty and subtly haughty, so austere in her virginal beauty, that it seemed to him he must have wronged her with his silent conjectures.