And Anne reminded herself how she had been with him to the opera and to students’ balls in Paris night after night, but the memory of them was already dim, a lovely voice thrilling her for a moment, a sea of lights, a crowd of faces.
“I cannot keep my attention fixed on the stage,” she said to herself. “At every moment I have to turn to glance at him, to look at his blunt healthy features, his soft and furry hair, his round head, so like a seal’s or an otter’s thrust suddenly above the surface of the water. All I remember of the opera, of the picture galleries, and of the castles which we saw yesterday, is catching Grandison’s eye to see whether he were moved by the same things that moved me—and because of that I felt no emotion except about him.”
She laughed, but her happiness was coloured with the regret that her only opportunity of seeing so many beautiful things should have been during her honeymoon.
“We should have been just as happy if we had stayed in that horrid room with the beautiful view.” And Anne recalled how they had spent their first days held in a web of unrealities, making declarations, mumbling affidavits before a consul, handing telegrams through wire netting, and patiently waiting for permission to get married. “Days vague and as impossible to remember as the waving of weeds seen through water,” she said. But Sir John, who had cut off his son’s allowance while he was living in Paris with Richard Sotheby, had been pleased at the marriage and had sent a cable with his blessing and a thousand pounds from Ceylon.... And dismissing the past, Anne paused for a moment to wonder what their life would be like in the future. Grandison had consented to live in London and to take the job his father had offered him in the tea business.
“How long he is, dressing!” she exclaimed, and jumping up she ran up the yellow stairs to their bedroom.
She had forgotten to take Richard’s letter with her, but it was the first thing she spoke of.
“You’ve been using my powder puff,” she added, for his shaven cheek was delicious with scent.
“Stingy! Stingy! If there is anything I hate it’s stinginess!” he exclaimed, embracing her again. She fought with him but was overcome; they laughed, but their laughter changed suddenly to the seriousness of love-making.
“What a devil you are, Anne, slipping out of bed like a mouse without waking me until the moment you were going down to breakfast.”
“It is difficult to wake you,” she answered. “And I always feel a criminal when I do.”