"Nothing! I won't take it."
"Got a proud stomach from your aristocratic ancestors, have you?" said Old George. "Well, you needn't have; the place is your father's son's place, you needn't be altogether so squeamish."
"I wouldn't take it if I was starving," she asserted.
"You're in no danger of starving, so don't talk," said the old man, testily. "It's a nice little place. I should enjoy coming out here and spending a few months of the year myself. Should like nothing better."
"But I won't take it," said Mary.
Jack went grinning off to his stable. He was angry, but it was the kind of anger that made him feel sarcastic.
Damn her! She was in love with him. She had a passion for him. What did she want? Did she want him to make love to her, and run away with her, and abandon Monica and Jane and the twin babies?—No doubt she would listen to such a proposition hard enough. But he was never going to make it her. He had married Monica, and he would stick to her. She was his first and chief wife, and whatever happened, she should remain it. He detested and despised divorce; a shifty business. But it was nonsense to pretend that Monica was the beginning and end of his marriage with woman. Woman was the matrix, the red earth, and he wanted his roots in this earth. More than one root, to keep him steady and complete. Mary instinctively belonged to him. Then why not belong to him completely? Why not? And why not make a marriage with her too? The legal marriage with Monica, his own marriage with Mary. It was a natural thing. The old heroes, the old fathers of red earth, like Abraham in the Bible, like David even, they took the wives they needed for their own completeness, without this nasty chop-and-change business of divorce. Then why should he not do the same?
He would have all the world against him. But what would it matter, if he were away in the Never-Never, where the world just faded out? Monica could have the chief house. But Mary should have another house, with garden and animals if she wanted them. And she should have her own children: his children. Why should she be only Auntie to Monica's children? Mary, with her black, glistening eyes and her short, dark, secret body, she was asking for children. She was asking him for his children, really. He knew it, and secretly she knew it; and Aunt Matilda, and even Old George knew it, somewhere in themselves. And Old George was funny. He wouldn't really have minded an affair between Jack and Mary, provided it had been kept dark. He would even have helped them to it, so long as they would let nothing be known.
But Jack was too wilful and headstrong, and too proud, for an intrigue. An intrigue meant a certain cringing before society, and this he would never do. If he took Mary, it was because he felt she instinctively belonged to him. Because, in spite of the show she kept up, her womb was asking for him. And he wanted her for himself. He wanted to have her and to answer her. And he would be judged by nobody.
He rose quickly, returning to the house. Mary and the old man were in the kitchen, getting their candles to go to bed.