"Oh, Jack, isn't it dear of them?" she said. "Of course I know it's all for you really, but you've endowed me with everything, and so this is mine too. Look at that little duck whom that nice-faced woman is holding up, waving a flag! Hark to the bells! Do you remember the poem by Browning, 'The air broke into a mist with bells'? This is a positive London fog of bells; can't you taste it? Is it the foghorns, in that case, that make the fogs? And here we are at the lodge and there's the lake, and the house! Ah, what a gracious thing a summer evening is. But how fragile, Jack, and how soon over."
That wistful, underlying tenderness in her nature, almost melancholy but wholly womanly, rose for the moment to the surface. It was not the less sincere because it was seldom in evidence. It was as truly part of her (and a growing part of her) as her brilliant enjoyment and insouciance. And the expression of it gleamed darkly in her soft brown eyes, as she leaned back in the carriage and took his hand.
"I will try to make you happy," she said.
He bent over her.
"Don't try to do anything, Dodo," he said. "Just—just be."
For a moment a queer little qualm came over her. Had she followed her immediate impulse, she would have said, "I don't know how to love like that. I have to try: I want to learn." But that would have done no good, and in her most introspective moments Dodo was always practical. The qualm lasted but a moment, as the door was opened, when they drew up. But it lasted long enough to cause her to wonder whether it would be the past that would be entered again instead of the future, entered, too, not by another door, but by the same.
On the doorstep she paused.
"Lift me over the threshold, Jack," she said; "it is such bad luck for a bride to stumble when she enters her home."
"My dear, what nonsense."
"Very likely, but let's be nonsensical. Let us propitiate all the gods and demons. Lift me, Jack."