He shook his head against her breast.
"Why not?"
"I don't know. I can't just tell her I love her. It's more than that. She wouldn't understand. If she did, she might hate me for it."
It might have been youth and the utter lack of his experience. He was only just eighteen. But Mary found in it more than that. In the first great emotion in his life, when he was stirred so deep as to touch those very first impressions she had given him in his childhood, he was setting on one side himself and the demands that Nature made on him.
How little his Dorothy would appreciate that, Mary had made certain estimate the first moment they had met. No awe of love was there in her; no vision his need of her could ever destroy. She, with the many others, was amongst those women who, bowing herself to the possessive passions of men, would sell her soul in slavery to share them if she could.
Whatever of her training it was they had bereft him of at Wenlock, however out of the true line they had bent that green bough her hands had fashioned, still in the vital elements of his being, he sought the clear light above the forest trees about him. In this swift rush of love, a storm that beat and shook him with the force of it, some spiritual impulse still remained. He felt his Dorothy was some sacred thing, too sweet to touch with hands all fierce as his.
How long would that remain with him? In the materialism of his new environment would they let him keep it for long? Another day and drawn by the shrilling call of Nature into the arms of Dorothy, might he not lose it even so soon as that?
He did not know how true he spoke when he had said she would not understand. A product of the laws of man she was, eager and passionate to submit, needing that trampling spirit of possession to give her sense of life, caring little how soon love trod itself into the habit of familiar touch.
No emotion of ideals would she have with which to set her children forth upon their journeys. Into an old and tired world they would be ushered with grudging of the pain they brought and fretting complaint of ugly circumstance. Consequences of passion they would be, no more, with nothing but the magic of youth to give them laughter in their playgrounds.
So well did Mary know that night as he lay there against her breast, John would not keep his spirit long untouched when other arms than hers had held him. Too soon had they taken her from him. Too soon, in that moment's want of faith, had she let him go. Possession of the earth already had brought him scorn of it. Again and again had she seen that in the change of his mind towards their simple life at Yarningdale.