“Not in the instance of you and me. You knew quite well that I wasn’t going to give myself a free rein to fall in love with you after you had settled to marry someone else. Besides, it you come to think of it, a man dangling after a married woman is just as ridiculous as a girl dangling after a married man. I don’t see why a man shouldn’t be allowed to retain his self-respect as much as a woman.”
Though, as far as the spoken word went, they had arrived at no agreement, no compromise even on which agreement could be based, they both felt that somehow in the region of unspoken treaties the ground had been cleared. Though the wheels did not yet revolve again, rust had been wiped off them. And in Peter’s next speech the scouring of the wash-leather was busy.
“You mustn’t think that I don’t regret what we’re suffering under, Nellie,” he said. “I regret it most awfully. I’ve been saying, and I stick to it still, that you are responsible for it. It was you who closed my windows and bolted my doors. It would be simply silly of me to pretend that I was broken-hearted about it, for that would imply that I had been or was in love with you. But that doesn’t prevent my being sorry, or my missing, which I acutely do, our old relationship. I don’t know if it’s any use trying to recapture it. ‘Trying,’ probably, hasn’t much effect on what you feel. It’s no use ‘trying’ to feel hot if you happen to feel cold, or trying to feel ill when you do feel well——”
“My dear, it makes the whole difference,” said Nellie quickly. “Will you try to—to feel yourself back in your relationship with me? I want it, too, Peter.”
She pulled back his encroaching knee which just now she had pushed away and kept her hand on it. The very fact that this triviality was so instinctive constituted the significance of it.
“I hadn’t reckoned with losing you,” she went on. “No, I don’t excuse myself or account for myself. Probably I should have done just the same if I had reckoned with it. Probably, if it was all to do again now, I should do the same. Don’t let us labour the point; if you’ll try, that’s all I ask. I’ll try, too, if that will be of any use. I put my nose in the air just as much as you did, as if my nose wasn’t sufficiently in the air already. But it always turns up at the end.”
“Not to matter; don’t mention it,” said Peter.
“That’s the old style, Peter,” she said. “Keep it up; run with it till it works on its own account. Motor-cycle, you know.”
They were looking at each other now with something of the alert unconsciousness of two old friends alone together. But certainly the machine required running with at present.
“They’re heavy things to push when they won’t get going,” said he.