Richard's trouble was his wife, who seemed not unlike Sophia's mother. He was both too kindly and too weak—for his was one of those temperaments that shrink from any display of unpleasantness—to have mastered her brutally and for good—and strong enough to go on living in the same house with her because, although she made his life a weariness, she was an intensely conventional woman to whom the position of a wife separated from her husband before all the world would have been intolerable. Between him and Sophia the fact that they both knew the terror of not being able to slip out even to post a letter without dreading what they might find on going back, made a bond of sympathy.
Sophia, ignorant as she was, could not be a young, and, for some people, a beautiful woman, without having learned a few stray scraps of wisdom, and one was that when a man began to confide his troubles to her it was as well to see less of him. But Sophia let herself drift, because she liked being with the man so much; and also the fact that he was from her own place, that the relentless gods had brought him to Florence to meet her, and would, in due course, send them both back to where, henceforth, they would know each other, gave her a curious feeling of being entrapped in some web too powerful to break. She never blamed him or let him blame himself for what inevitably happened.
"Sophia, my sweet," he wrote her in one of the letters she now picked up at random. "I didn't deliberately set to work to make love to you. I knew your beauty inflamed me and your wit delighted me. But when we first met I thought we should just see each other a few times and quarrel and laugh, and I should revel in your looks and no harm done. And now little Miss Jervis has turned into Sophia, and either I must have Sophia for ever and ever mine, or I ought to have stuck to an elderly uncle line and come away with no tears for her and no self-loathing for me, and no need to lie and shuffle and make her share in the lies and shuffles for the future."
"You'll never do that, dear," thought Sophia, laying the letter down. "When I have to come back to London we'll meet honestly, or not at all. For there's nothing on earth that's worth living in a sea of lies for. . . ." She remembered how he had asked her if she would come and see his wife, so that he and she might meet on an accepted footing, and how the doubtful taste of the proposition had jarred her. He argued that because they would be honestly "playing the game" by his wife, Sophia need not mind the meeting; his knowledge of women was curiously insensitive and blunt, and he had no conception of how impossible it would be for Sophia to sit quietly and see another woman doing the honours of his house. In this he was not entirely to blame, for Sophia so contrived to hoodwink him that he never quite knew she loved him, certainly never knew the force of her love. He thought of her as a reckless, innocent child stung to lavish giving out of affection and pity, and so, to begin with, she had been. The woman Sophia kept up what had become a pose, not only from the pride of a maiden, but also because some instinct told her that sooner or later he would rather be able to think she had not given more.
For the first few days either of them would have declared that all was well and there was no danger, yet each day marked a distinct step further on, a definite phase passed through. Sometimes they wandered about Florence, in the Boboli and the Cascine gardens, or upon the windy heights of Fiesole; sometimes he hired a queer little carriage with swift, bedecked horses, and they drove far out into the country, not getting home till night. The day before the revelation came was one of the most exquisite they spent together, one of which Sophia could still hardly bear to think. Leaving the carriage at a little village, they wandered on foot into a lovely valley, and laughed because he called it "old mastery," pointing out the Turneresque effect of a ruined castle set high amidst a mass of olives which were being blown pale against it. Presently they came to a stream that stormed down the valley and fell into seven successive pools; deep, still pools, as green as ice, with sunlit bubbles sent driving through them by the impetus of the clear arch of descending water. Beside the largest pool, on a smooth grey slab of rock screened by the over-hanging cliff, they sat and ate their lunch of bread and hard-boiled eggs and wine, and the sun shone on the glossy red-brown hair so cunningly folded about Sophia's head, and shone in the depths of her grey eyes and on her tanned skin. When they had finished she lay a little below him, closing her eyes to feel the blown spray drift against her lids, and she never knew till he told her that his hand had been on her hair the whole time, and never knew till later still that she had been loving him even then. The day passed in a perfect harmony of speech and silences, and all the time Sophia was giving—giving peace and mothering and delight, giving the sky and the earth and the very air they breathed. Only some one who has ever made a gift of a day knows the joy that it is—how each golden moment, conscious of its own beauty, hangs poised like a held breath; how the sun and wind and flowers and the upward curves of the supporting earth are all parts of the gift, making the giver a god who pours out creation for his friend.
The next day they took train to Pisa on a more sophisticated errand, since he had undertaken to make a sketch of the tower for a friend who was "sheeking" some Italian backgrounds. Sophia wandered happily about the town while he did so, and then they met for lunch in the garden of an old inn.
"I'm afraid of to-day," he told her, "because it can't be as perfect as yesterday. Nothing could—that's the worst of a day like that."
"I'll make it as perfect," Sophia replied, and she kept her word. She still had no idea she loved him, she only knew that she wanted to shield and protect him, that she was happy with him and felt the power to make him happy, and that she trusted him utterly. Without realizing it, she tempted him cruelly by her very trust, and that day her calm recklessness of speech, her gaze that meeting his so straight and untroubled, disturbed him so profoundly, were too much for him.
"Take off your glove," he said suddenly.
Sophia's notions of love had been culled from books, and she considered it inseparable from what she termed "thrills." How was she to know that a woman, especially what is called a "nice" woman, can love without the promptings of the pulses? Because she felt no sensuous "thrill" as the tone of command, it never occurred to her to think she could be in love, wherein she was making another common literary mistake—that of thinking that every woman enjoys being mastered. Sophia found her joy in ready compliance with the demands of the beloved, not in arranging set scenes of clashing wills and conciliations. Taking off her glove, she gave him her hand.