"Poor little Norah!" she echoed half mockingly, and crumbled some mortar off the broken wall and watched it splash into the water below. She was wondering how it was that she had been more fascinated in half-an-hour by handsome, empty-headed Jack Raleigh than she had been in three long years by this large-hearted musician, with the high forehead and the cavernous eyes, with his passion for metaphysics and Socialism, and his ardent desires to reform society and the world in his own lifetime. Yet she found him interesting sometimes, generally when he was not there and she was thinking about him, and she wondered again why he did not interest her more, and whether she would not have tumbled into a commonplace engagement with him if her parents had been alive and he had been asked to dine at the Court, like any ordinary young man, and she had been forbidden, like any ordinary young woman, to come down to the inn and play with his child. But she had no parents to impose conventionality upon her, and she had gloried in her liberty for twenty-five years, and she was loth to give it up now for the sake of a man who, she felt sure, would bore her in a week with his desperate enthusiasms, and whom she was not even sure that she loved. No, she could not marry him, she felt sure, and she looked up to say so, and met his restless eyes watching her with such a boy's eagerness that she again went off on a side issue.
"I am not livable with, that is the truth," she said rather weakly, and crumbled some more mortar off the wall, and wished he would not look at her so gloomily. He was thinking that the courtship was not going as smoothly as he expected it would, and beginning dimly to understand that for the only time in his experience he was humbling himself before a woman who was not going to fall a victim to his persuasions; and the discovery did not make him more eloquent nor less humble, though it tended to make him look at the question still more blindly from his own point of view, and he told himself again, obstinately, that he could not live without her for his wife.
"Lady Joan," he said suddenly, "is it me that you dislike, or marriage?"
"Both," she said, and laughed heartily, and became swiftly grave again, and came up to him and took both his hands, an unwonted action that brought the color to his cheeks; "don't you see, my dear friend, that if we were to marry I should plague your life out, and you would never write another note of music, and Mrs. Reginald Routh and all the others would point at me with invective? And you would bore me to the verge of extinction in a month! Of course if you didn't like me it might work better, because then I should have to make you fall in love with me, and that would prevent it from being such a deadly dull affair. Or if I hated you I might do it, because then we could live our separate lives, and there would be nothing to spoil. Don't you see how marriage always spoils things? It is never romantic; it is expedient, that's all. It does for people who are not fond of one another, or for people who do not feel such things; but for two people who are in love, and one of them a hypersensitive musician—bah! it would be madness! Not that I am in love, of course."
He chose to ignore the feminine way in which she concluded, and as she dropped his hands and swung away from him, he found himself feeling for his tobacco pouch, and he reflected that the courtship was not much more romantic than the married life she pictured.
"Then you believe in perpetual engagements?" he asked, for the sake of saying something.
"Not a bit of it," she replied gayly, leaning over the broken wall and watching the creatures in the water below; "engagements simply mean all the conventional drawbacks without the moral conveniences. No, there is only one way out of it, and that won't work when you come to examine it."
"And what is that?" he asked, like a man, rashly.
"To marry some one who doesn't matter, and be in love with some one else," she replied carelessly, and kept her face averted.
He rolled up his cigarette and lighted it, and wondered whether women ever discussed among themselves these subjects which they had no diffidence in approaching with men.