Then she wrote and said that she loved me and had always loved me and would marry me at once. I suppose I believed this because at the moment I so wanted to believe it, and because also, at the moment she so intensely believed it herself.
The generosity and the self-deception were both so like Claire. Her emotional impulses are so violent and her capacity for sustained effort so small.
It would be ungracious, to say the least of it, to dwell upon the failure that we both know our married life to be. It is sufficient to say that, in tying herself to a semi-cripple, with a too highly developed critical faculty and a preference for facing facts stark and undecorated, Claire, in a word—and a vulgar word at that—bit off more than she could chew.
We have lived at Cross Loman Manor House ever since my father’s death. The Ambreys, Claire’s cousins, are our nearest neighbors, but they have been at the Mill House only for the last seven years, and Cross Loman looks upon them as newcomers. The Kendals have been eighteen years at Dheera Dhoon, which is the name unerringly bestowed by General Kendal on their big stucco villa at the outskirts of the town. Nancy Fazackerly was born at Loman Cottage, lived there until she married, and came back there, a few years afterward, widowed—and so on. It is just the same with the tradespeople and the farmers. Applebee was always the baker, and when he died, Emma Applebee, his daughter, remained on in the business. A boy, whom Emma Applebee has always strenuously impressed upon us all as “my little nephew,” will succeed Emma.
Halfway up Cross Loman Hill is the church, with the rectory just below it. Bending has been there for thirty years. Lady Annabel Bending, who was the widow of a colonial governor when the Rector married her, has been among us only for the last two years.
We all meet one another pretty frequently, but I seldom care to take my wheel chair and my unsightly crutch outside the park gates, and so my intercourse is mostly with the people who come to the house.
Mary Ambrey and her children come oftenest. Claire’s feelings, on the whole, are less often hurt by Mary than by most other people. Claire neither likes, admires, nor approves of Sallie and Martyn Ambrey, but she is at the same time genuinely and pathetically fond of them—a contradiction as painful to herself as it is probably irksome to Martyn and Sallie.
Martyn has always been her favorite because he is a boy. Throughout his babyhood she invariably spoke of him as “little-Martyn-God-bless-his-dear-chubby-little-face,” and she unconsciously resents it, now that little Martyn has grown up and has ceased to be chubby—which he did long before she ceased to call him so. As for the formula of benediction, I think Claire feels that God, in all probability, experiences exactly the same difficulty as herself in viewing Sallie and Martyn as real people at all.
On the whole, Martyn and Sallie do not behave well toward Claire. They are cold and contemptuous, both of them conscious of being logical, impersonal, and supremely rational, where their cousin is none of these things, but rather the exact contrary to them.
Martyn is twenty-one and at Oxford.