“Jane, you are so strong-minded,” murmured Lady Ingleby. “It goes with your linen collars, your tailor-made coats, and your big boots. I cannot picture myself in a linen collar, nor can I conceive of myself as standing before Michael and informing him that I loved Jim!”
Jane Dalmain laughed good-humouredly, plunged her large hands into the pockets of her tweed coat, stretched out her serviceable brown boots and looked at them.
“If by ‘strong-minded’ you mean a wholesome dislike to the involving of a straightforward situation in a tangle of disingenuous sophistry, I plead guilty,” she said.
“Oh, don’t quote Sir Deryck,” retorted Lady Ingleby, crossly. “You ought to have married him! I never could understand such an artist, such a poet, such an eclectic idealist as Garth Dalmain, falling in love with you, Jane!”
A sudden light of womanly tenderness illumined Jane’s plain face. “The wife” looked out from it, in simple unconscious radiance.
“Nor could I,” she answered softly. “It took me three years to realise it as an indubitable fact.”
“I suppose you are very happy,” remarked Myra.
Jane was silent. There were shrines in that strong nature too wholly sacred to be easily unveiled.
“I remember how I hated the idea, after the accident,” said Myra, “of your tying yourself to blindness.”
“Oh, hush,” said Jane Dalmain, quickly. “You tread on sacred ground, and you forget to remove your shoes. From the first, the sweetest thing between my husband and myself has been that, together, we learned to kiss that cross.”