“What if I am?” she asked.
“Then, dearest Stella, you have only yourself to thank. He did not think you clay anyhow a week ago. Else, why should he have asked you to marry him? Or do you mean that Martin has changed since then?”
Again Stella paused.
“I must say it more simply,” she said. “Look at it in this way. What if Martin is music? if everything else to him is secondary to that?”
“Then he would have asked the complete works of Chopin to marry him,” remarked Lady Sunningdale. “But, as far as I know, he didn’t. It occurs to me that he asked you. And I know, I can feel it, that he is devoted to you, really in love with you. Only don’t, for Heaven’s sake, let your mind dwell for a moment on the relative positions that you and music hold to him.”
“I have done worse than that,” said Stella. “I have asked him what relative positions we hold. I did so to-day.”
“My dear, how insane! What did he say?”
“He told me not to talk nonsense. But is it nonsense?”
Lady Sunningdale drew a little nearer to the fire. All her kindliness, all her good nature, and what was perhaps even more important, all her tact and finesse, was enlisted on behalf of these two. She recognised to herself that there was here in all probability only one of those tiny misunderstandings which must occur between a man and a woman who are now for the first time really learning each other. At the same time it seemed to her quite important, if possible, to thoroughly dust, clean out, and disinfect this dark little mental corner in Stella, for it might easily contain the germ of a misunderstanding that would be by no means trivial.
“Yes, it is nonsense,” she said, decidedly. “It is poisonous, suicidal nonsense. You are exactly like the Bear. You don’t seem to grasp any more than the Bear does what music means to Martin. It means, in one word, ‘God.’ It is his religion,—and, good gracious, supposing he was a bishop and you were going to marry him, you would not, I hope, be jealous of his religion. And in music Martin is a very big bishop, indeed! But in other respects—you forget this too—he is simply a child. I can’t imagine what Martin will be like when he is middle-aged. It is impossible to think of him as middle-aged. Martin and middle age are not compatible terms. True, Karl says he has been having a good many birthdays lately. I, too, think he has, but he has, so to speak, made saints’ days of them all, and dedicated them to his religion. All but one, that is to say.”