“Yes, I love him with all my heart. If I never see him again I will go on loving him for the rest of my life.”
In face of this Rose found nothing to say. The situation had got beyond her. She felt increasingly curious. She wanted to know more about this man; but Esmé’s manner baffled her. It was very evident that the subject was distressing to the girl. There was something behind all this of which she was in ignorance and which she felt she ought to be told. She put one or two leading questions, but all she elicited was the fact that Hallam was a man of independent means and no fixed abode. That struck Rose as significant. If no duties engrossed him it was odd that he should be satisfied to communicate with the girl only by post. If he were sufficiently interested in her to keep up a correspondence, why did he never come to see her?
“I would advise you to put Paul Hallam out of your thoughts,” she said, as an outcome of these reflections.
Then she kissed the girl, and got off the bed, and stood hesitating between the bed and the door, sleepy, yet reluctant to leave her sister alone.
“I hoped when I came in you would have a different story to tell me,” she added. “Don’t waste your life, thinking of a man who doesn’t care enough to want to come and see you. George is honest, and he loves you. It’s a pity to throw away a really good chance of happiness.”
“To marry a man when you love another would not bring happiness,” Esmé said, facing her sister in the moonlight, half undressed, and with her hair falling about her shoulders and shading her face. “And it wouldn’t be fair to George.”
“I expect George, like most people, would prefer half a loaf to no bread,” Rose answered. She opened the door. “Good-night, dear,” she said softly. “You go to sleep, and don’t bother your head about any of them. Men aren’t worth half the tears women waste on them.”
She returned to her own room, and stood for a moment or so looking thoughtfully at the sleeping face of her husband, as he lay on his back with arms spread wide across the bed, and a faint smile touched her lips.
“It is all beauty and romance till we marry you,” she mused. “Then we discover that our demi-gods are just mere men. I wonder whether I would have wept over you in the old days? ... I didn’t anyway.”
With which she got into bed and fell asleep.