“D’you honestly think that our marriage would have been less successful than those we propose to make?”
“I don’t propose——”
“Yes, you do. Simon, you can’t let me down. You’re going to marry Estelle.”
“I can’t bear it,” said Simon. “She’s so—so fidgety. Always chucking herself about. You’re so calm, Pat. . . . Besides, she wouldn’t look at me.”
“Well, she’s looked at you pretty hard for the last twelve months,” said Patricia sagely. “Besides, you can but try. If she says ‘No,’ well, then, you’ve done your bit. But it’d make it easier for me. I’d like to feel we were both in the same old boat. I know I’ve got your love, but then I’d have your understanding too. I’d feel you knew what it meant. I don’t want you to be unhappy, Simon dear: but I think you’d be less unhappy if you were married. And—and it’d be putting two hedges between us, instead of only one. . . . You see, when I marry George—as I suppose I shall: we’re supping together, and you know what that means. . . . Well, when I marry George, that won’t wash you out. I’ll be bound to think of you. And if I think of you single, unmarried—available, Simon, it’ll be ten times as hard to chase you out of my mind. And I want to play the game. One may have to marry for money, but at least one can honour one’s bond. . . . And I think, perhaps, it’d be the same for you. You needn’t marry money, because you’re a man: but three hundred a year isn’t much, and it’s growing less. And in these days. . . . Well, Estelle’s got fifteen thousand. Besides, she’s awfully nice. And if you were married, you’d have a game to play. D’you see, Simon?”
“Yes,” said Simon Beaulieu. “You mean that in love, as in everything else in the world, the positive’s easier to deal with than the negative. Better a Dead Sea apple than only forbidden fruit.”
“And you say we shouldn’t get on!” said Patricia deliberately.
There was a silence.
Shoulder to shoulder, the two stood still as statuary, looking into the night. For such an exercise their coign of vantage was superb. The balustrade before them severed the gardens from the park. This for the most part was walled with rising woods, but here the ground fell sharply into a valley which ran like a giant gutter, straight and clean, to the jaws of Peering Gap. Such was the darkness that the gap was not to be seen, but a starlit scallop of sky showed where it lay.
At length—