“A man can’t live on cows.”
“But you have other things and you live in the country. People can’t have everything. I don’t suppose you’d change with anybody really, if you could. People are like that. They grumble, but they like being themselves. Suppose you were a young man in a shop, measuring cloth or selling bacon. You’d find that much duller, I should think.”
He laughed a little. “Where did you learn this wisdom?”
“I’ve had experience,” she said staidly. “Yes, you’d find it duller.”
“Perhaps you’re right. But then, you might come to buy the bacon. I should look forward to that.”
In the darkness, these playful words frightened her a little; they hurt her sense of what was fitting from him to her and at the same time they pleased her with their hint of danger.
“Would you?” she asked slowly.
He paused, saying, “May I light a pipe?” and by the flame of the match he examined her face quite openly for a moment. “You know I would,” he said.
She met his look, her eyes wavered and neither spoke for a long time. She was oppressed by his nearness, the smell of his tobacco, her own inexplicable delight. From the trees by the roadside birds gave out happy chirrups, country people in their Sunday clothes and creaking boots passed or overtook the silent pair; a man on a horse rode out from a gate and cantered with very little noise on the rough grass edging the road. Henrietta watched him until he disappeared and then it seemed as if he had never been there at all. A sheep in a field uttered a sad cry and every sight and sound seemed a little unreal, like things happening on a stage.
And gradually Henrietta’s excitement left her. The world seemed a sad and lonely place; she remembered that she herself was lonely; there was no one now to whom she was the first, and she had a longing for her mother. She wished that instead of returning to Nelson Lodge with its cleanliness and richness and comfort, she might turn the key of the boarding-house door and find herself in the narrow passage with the smell of cooking and the gas turned low; she wished she could run up the stairs and rush into the drawing-room and find her mother sitting there, sewing by the fire, and see her look up and hear her say, “Well, Henry dear, what have you been doing?” After all, that old life was better than this new one. The troubles of her mother, her own young struggles for food and warmth, the woes of Mrs. Banks, had in them something nobler than she could find in the distresses of Christabel and Aunt Rose and Francis Sales, something redeeming them from the sordidness in which they were set. She checked a sob.