Danvers and Marian had known each the other from childhood. And she perhaps came nearer to liking him for himself than did any one else of his acquaintance. She was used to his conceit, his selfishness, his meanness and smallness in suspicion, his arrogance, his narrow-mindedness. She knew his good qualities—his kindness of heart, his shamed-face generosity, his honesty, the strong if limited sense of justice which made him a good employer and a good landlord. They had much in common—the same companions, the same idea of the agreeable and the proper, the same passion for out-door life, especially for hunting. He fell in love with her when she came back from two years in England and France, and she thought that she was in love with him. She undoubtedly was fond of him, proud of his handsome, athletic look and bearing, proud of his skill and daring in the hunting field.
One day—it was in the autumn a year before Howard met her—they were “in at the death” together after a run across a stiff country that included several dangerous jumps. “You’re the only one that can keep up with me,” he said, admiring her glowing face and star-like eyes, her graceful, assured seat on a hunter that no one else either cared or dared to ride.
“You mean you are the only one who can keep up with me,” she laughed, preparing for what his face warned her was coming.
“No I don’t, Marian dear. I mean that we ought to go right on keeping up with each other. You won’t say no, will you?”
Marian was liking him that day—he was looking his best. She particularly liked his expression as he proposed to her. She had intended to pretend to refuse him; instead her colour rose and she said: “No—which means yes. Everybody expects it of us, Teddy. So I suppose we mustn’t disappoint them.”
The fact that “everybody” did expect it, the fact that he was the great “catch” in their set, with his two hundred and fifty thousand a year, his good looks and his good character—these were her real reasons, with the first dominant. But she did not admit it to herself then. At twenty-four even the mercenary instinct tricks itself out in a most deceptive romantic disguise if there is the ghost of an opportunity. Besides, there was no reason, and no sign of an approaching reason, for the shadow of a suspicion that life with Teddy Danvers would not be full of all that she and her friends regarded as happiness.
But she would not marry immediately. She was tenacious of her freedom. She was restless, dissatisfied with herself and not elated by her prospects. She had an excellent mind, reasonable, appreciative, ambitious. Until she “came out” she had spent much time among books; but as she had had no capable director of her reading, she got from it only a vague sense, that there was somewhere something in the way of achievement which she might possibly like to attain if she knew what it was or where to look for it. As she became settled in her place in the routine of social life, as her horizon narrowed to the conventional ideas of her set, this sense of possible and attractive achievement became vaguer. But her restlessness did not diminish.
“I never saw such an ungrateful girl,” was Mrs. Carnarvon’s comment upon one of Marian’s outbursts of almost peevish fretting. “What do you want?”
“That’s just it,” exclaimed Marian, half-laughing. “What do I want? I look all about me and I can’t see it. Yet I know that there must be something. I think I ought to have been a man. Sometimes I feel like running away—away off somewhere. I feel as if I were getting second-bests, paste substitutes for the real jewels. I feel as I did when I was a child and demanded the moon. They gave me a little gilt crescent and said: ‘Here is a nice little moon for baby;’ and it made me furious.”
Mrs. Carnarvon looked irritated. “I don’t understand it. You are getting the best of everything. Of course you can’t expect to be happy. I don’t suppose that any one is happy. But all the solid things of life are yours, and you can and should be comfortable and contented.”