It was not so much that she wanted a man to love as to feel love itself with all its accompanying sensations of fear and wonder, yet knowing all the time that before these emotions could happen to her, she must attract and be found acceptable, must in another waken some strange need to be the kindling spark in her.
Only once had it seemed she had succeeded. There had come a visitor to the Royal George with whom in the ordinary course of the summer life of Bridnorth, acquaintance had soon been made. None of them were slow to realize the interest he had taken in Fanny. Before he left they twice had walked over the moors to where on the highest and loneliest point of the cliffs you can see the whole sweep of Bridnorth bay and in clear weather the first jutting headland on the Cornish coast.
Many a love match in Bridnorth had been made about those heathered moors. It was no love match he made with Fanny. What happened only Mary knew. He had taken Fanny in his arms and he had kissed her. For many months she had felt those kisses, not in the touch of his lips so much as in waves of emotion that tumbled in a riot through her veins and left her trembling in the darkness of night. For he had never told her that he loved her.
In three weeks he had gone away having said no word to bind her. In two months' time or little more, she read of his marriage in the London papers and that night stared and stared at her reflection in the mirror when she went to bed.
For in her heart and below the communicating consciousness of her thoughts, she knew what had happened. Never could she have told herself; far less spoken of it to others. But while he had held her in his arms, she had known even then. She had felt her body thin and spare and meager against his. Something unalluring in herself she had realized as his lips touched the eagerness of her own.
That strange need of which in experience she had no knowledge, she knew in that instant had not wakened in him as he held her. However passionate his kisses in their strangeness had seemed, they lacked a fire of which, knowing nothing, she yet knew all.
Still, nevertheless, she waited and the fatigue of that waiting each year was added in her eyes.
The coming of the coach to her was like that of a ship, hard-beating into harbor with broken spars and sails all rent. Yet with every coming, her heart lifted, and with every new arrival, strange to Bridnorth, her eyes would wear a brighter light, her laugh would catch a brighter ring.
"Really, you'd never think Fanny was thirty-three!" Hannah once said on one of these occasions.
"You wait for a week or two," retorted Jane.