“Yes, than his satisfied desire,” said Catherine with terrible commonsense. “He had just taken it. Do you suppose he would have let me pour it away if he was just going to take it?”
“I don’t know. You are stronger than he, I think.”
Maud gave a great sigh, picking up her book.
“I remember Mr. Cochrane practically offered to cure his neuralgia,” she said, “but I knew it was perfectly useless to suggest it to Thurso; nor at the time did I believe in Mr. Cochrane. But since then——”
Catherine looked up, and saw in Maud’s face what she had suspected.
“Oh, Maud!” she said. “Are you in love with him?”
Maud leaned forward, and her book again dropped face downwards on the gravel. She did not notice it.
“Oh, I haven’t the slightest idea,” she said. “Catherine, I do like him awfully—I like him most awfully. No one has ever attracted me like that. Good gracious! how indelicate I am! But I don’t care one straw. I should like to put all my affairs and all poor Thurso’s into his hands. I should do it with the utmost confidence, and I should then just curl round as one does in bed, and feel everything is all right. Is that being in love? I don’t know or care. He is so strong, and so windy and so sunny. He is surrounded by sun, and—and it is as if he had just had a cold bath and stepped into the sun. I love that strength and wind. Don’t you like it? I want somebody who would go on playing undoubled spades at bridge in the middle of an earthquake. He would—for a shilling a hundred. Am I in love with him? I tell you I don’t know. Certainly this sort of thing has never happened to me before, and, again, I certainly have never been in love. So perhaps ‘these are the ones.’ Oh, do tell me! When Thurso proposed to you, was it like that? Did you feel there wasn’t anybody else who really mattered? Oh dear! poor Mr. Cochrane, to have all this put upon him! He hasn’t shown the slightest sign of doing more than admire my fishing. Lots of people have done that. But about you and Thurso, did you feel that? Is that the one?”
There was a fine irony about this, and Catherine, in spite of the previous discussion on Christian Science, which laid down that all that had any real existence was good, felt disposed to believe in the malice that lurked in chance questions. She evaded the direct answer.
“Oh, there are as many ways of love as there are people in the world,” she said. “But, dear, I regard you with suspicion. There are certain symptoms——”