Edna disliked the memory of the scene that had led to his proposal, although time and her own industry had draped the situation with much that it had lacked at the moment. She had met him on board ship, and her mother, a slightly vulgar woman who had always rather disliked the only one of her daughters whom she had not married off in early girlhood, had speedily discovered that the owner of Culmhayes was in need of a wife. Edna, who had so long and so vainly visualised herself as the ideal Héloïse to an as yet-unfound Abēlard, had had time to become heartily sick of such barren dreams, and was by now prepared to relinquish them in favour of mere emancipation from spinsterhood and a restricted life.
For three of the endless days of a sea-voyage Sir Julian had appeared to be attracted by her, and on the fourth he had devoted himself to a blue-eyed widow, travelling second-class. The voyage was nearly over before the first-class passengers saw him again in their midst. Edna could remember still the evening before Dover was reached, when her mother, exasperated, had uttered the short, sudden gibe that had put into words the humiliating truth never before spoken between them.
She remembered still the despairing resentment that had seized upon her, at her realisation that such taunts, once uttered, may speedily become common, between people in constant proximity and without mutual respect.
Her rare tears had shaken her, and it was Sir Julian who had found her, crying in a solitary corner of the deck. Edna could remember—though never in her life did she willingly recall—that anger and misery together had made her give him, in reply to his urgent enquiry, something that very nearly approached to the raw, crude truth. And that night she had said to herself:
"Thank Heaven, I shall never see him again!"
The next morning he had asked her to marry him, making no protestations of passion such as she had once thought herself fated to evoke, but suggesting a mutual companionship, likely to prove of solace to both, and to release her from a situation which had become intolerable to her.
Julian's candour had humiliated her bitterly, for her one moment of envisaging the truth in all its bitterness had passed from her.
But she had accepted him.
She would not have believed it, had she been told that the evening of that self-betrayal, of which she thrust the memory away thenceforward, had witnessed the truest, most intimate relationship in which she and her husband were destined ever to stand towards one another.
The prosperous chatelaine of Culmhayes had had many years in which to forget the mortifications and disappointments of her pre-marriage days. She ruled an admirable household admirably, she "gave out," she discovered Nature, and she opposed a perpetual exhalation of large-hearted tolerance to the small shafts of rather indifferent satire that more and more formed the basis of Sir Julian's conjugal intercourse.