‘I don’t feel pale at all,’ she said again, trying to laugh and keeping her face turned away from him and the bright sunlight. ‘Inside, anyhow, I feel all rosy.’
She jumped up. ‘Let’s go for a walk, Chris darling,’ she said, shaking the buttercups he had stuck about her out of her dress. ‘We haven’t been for a real good long walk since we got here.’
‘Are you sure you’re not too tired?’ he asked, getting up too.
‘Tired!’
And to show him what she could do, she started off at a great pace and climbed over the five-barred gate into the road before he could reach her to help.
But she was tired; and though the quick walk and climb made her hot and hid her paleness, when she was in her room getting ready for the evening meal and the heat had faded out of her cheeks, she was startled by her face. Why, she looked ghastly. Her face seemed to be drooping with fatigue. The corners of her mouth were pitiful with it, her eyes appeared sunk in black shadows. And how white she was. She stared at herself aghast; and a recollection of those pleasant bus-conductors and taxi-men came into her mind, all smiling at her and calling her Miss as lately as a week ago, and of her own image in the glass at that time when, radiant with the cool happiness of not being in love, with the peace of gratified vanity at having somebody extraordinarily in love with her, while she herself loved him quite enough but not too much, she might have been and was so easily taken for really young.
Really young ... ah, what a lovely thing to be ... married to Christopher and really young....
The lamp in the cottage was like all lamps in cottages, and unpleasantly glared. There was only one, and that one was now in the living-room, and at meals stood on the table; and it had a white glass shade, and who older than twenty-five could expect to stand light from a lamp with a white glass shade after a long, hot, hilly walk? Even in her bedroom, lit up only by two hesitating candle-flames, she looked worn out, so what would she look like down there, faced by Christopher’s searching eyes and that intolerable lamp?
It was as she had feared, and he did stare at her—at first with open concern and questioning, and afterwards furtively, for she couldn’t help showing she shrank from having her fatigue noticed. At the beginning of their acquaintance she used to laugh when he told her she looked tired, and say she wasn’t tired a bit, and it was merely age made her seem so; she was perfectly frank and natural about it; she didn’t in the least care. Now she couldn’t laugh, she found—she couldn’t bring herself to say, with the gay indifference, the take-me-as-I-am-or-leave-me attitude that was hers at the beginning, a word about age.
She hurried through the meal, and got up before he had finished, and went and stood at the open window, looking at the stars.