"Aren't I making your head ache?"
"Damnably; but I like it. Do go on. I'm not sprouting a lily with anguish moist and fever-dew, or anything like that. I'm getting really thrilled. What you've just said is more illuminating than anything I've struck for a week."
"Really!" Mary stared at Peter with every trace of hostility vanished. "I thought you'd never understand that part."
"Lord!" said Peter. "Why not?"
Mary shook her head. "Well, I'd been corresponding all the time with George, and suddenly he wrote to me at the beginning of this month to say he'd come back from Germany, and had got a job on the Thunderclap—the Socialist weekly, you know—at a beginning screw of £4 a week, and wouldn't I chuck these capitalists and so on, and come and be an honest working woman with him. He could get me a secretarial job on the paper. I was to type and so on for him, and help him get his articles together. And he thought between us we should make £6 or £7 a week, which would be heaps to live on. And I was getting more frightened of Denis every day. So I said I would. But I knew there'd be an awful row with Gerald. And really I was rather ashamed—the engagement had been announced and there'd be a ghastly lot of talk and people trying to persuade me. And Denis might have made things horribly uncomfortable for Gerald—he was rather that sort. So we decided the best thing to do would be just to run away and get married first, and escape the wrangling."
"Quite so," said Peter. "Besides, it would look rather well in the paper, wouldn't it? 'Peer's Daughter Weds Socialist—Romantic Side-car Elopement—"£6 a Week Plenty," says Her Ladyship.'"
"Pig!" said Lady Mary.
"Very good," said Peter, "I get you! So it was arranged that the romantic Goyles should fetch you away from Riddlesdale—why Riddlesdale? It would be twice as easy from London or Denver."
"No. For one thing he had to be up North. And everybody knows one in town, and—anyhow, we didn't want to wait."
"Besides, one would miss the Young Lochinvar touch. Well, then, why at the unearthly hour of 3 a.m.?"