“Of course.”
“Let no one but me supply that big nursery with its rocking-horse.”
So we talked; not once but many times. And this Prince Charming in the guise of a businessman with a tall hat, catching the 9.15 up and the 5.46 down, became a joke with us: one of us at any rate, in the English way, which avoids facing facts, making haste to joke for fear of having to cry.
For a while it seemed as though the alarms about the censorious world were false; but I could rid myself very rarely, and then only for a few moments, of my fool’s paradise convictions. During the moments that were free from this haunting, our new united life went along happily. Rose had taken over the housekeeping by way of experience; we entertained; a school-fellow came on a visit; we walked over to Mrs. O’Gorman’s fairly often; there were parties here and there; and no serpent in the form of a successful lover entered Eden.
I was more than ever struck by Rose’s quiet detachment. She had no absorbing interests: most things found her ready to scrutinize them, but nothing captured her. Most young Britons of both sexes have their hobbies and overwork them, but Rose moved serenely through the days, getting everything done and apparently having time to turn aside if occasion called. I admired this gift immensely. My own tendency is to concentrate almost too exclusively. If she had a hobby it was the arranging of flowers, and I think that her skill and taste in this charming and neglected branch of domestic art amounted to genius.
And then, further refusals being no longer possible, Rose accepted an invitation to her Aunt Stratton’s, and nothing was ever the same again. O that woman!
I could see that something was wrong directly Rose came back. We were sufficiently on terms of intimacy for wireless to be established between us: at any rate from her to me. She did not exactly exhibit constraint, but there was something, as we say, on her mind. I was conscious of that. She talked freely enough; gathered up the strings of local life in her absence; told me something of the Strattons, the only one of whom that she really cared for being Angelica, the youngest, a girl of about twelve. Her Uncle George she liked, in a negative way; perhaps, more accurately, was sorry for. The others we didn’t discuss.
“That’s over anyway,” she said; “and nothing would get me to go abroad with them. But—” and then she stopped.
I waited for the rest of the sentence, but it never came. Instead, she asked some question about our own neighbourhood and we passed on to other interests.
But I guessed then what she was meaning to say and later discovered that I was right.