After that George gave her up, and began to perceive that it would need a critic more apt than he was to deal aright with her perverse but intelligent ignorance.
His third means of developing what was noblest in his wife’s character was, of course, religion. George was not religious himself, but it seemed a shocking thing for a woman not to be so, and still more for her to lie under the suspicion of practising the rites of an occult pagan faith. So he took her to church, where she shook with laughter at the curate’s appearance and voice, and yawned, and played with her husband’s fingers during the sermon.
“Oh, George, how clever it was of you not to laugh at the little man in white!” she cried, with a burst of laughter, at the church-door, when she had hurried down the aisle with indecorous haste. “Now I’ve been once to please you, you won’t make me go again, will you? It reminds me so dreadfully of the horrid Sundays at school.”
“Well, but don’t you like being in the church where we were married, darling?” he asked gently.
“Oh, but I can remember I’m married to you without going in again,” she answered laughing.
And so gradually this desultory musical and religious education dwindled down to visits to Westminster Abbey and the opera; nor could George succeed satisfactorily in establishing in her mind a proper sense of the difference there is between these two kinds of entertainment.
CHAPTER XVI.
The honeymoon was over, and the London season drawing to a close before the Colonel, who, to Lauriston’s great regret, seemed, since that inauspicious introduction to Nouna, to have withdrawn into a permanent coldness towards him, made an attempt to bridge over the restraint which had grown up between them. It was one evening when George, to do honour to a visitor who was a friend of his, had dined at mess, that the Colonel broke silence towards his old favourite, and inviting him, at dessert, to a chair just left vacant by his side, asked if he was still as anxious as ever to get leave for September.
George was rather surprised.
“I am more anxious than ever for it now, sir,” he said. Then, seeing that Lord Florencecourt’s brows contracted slightly with a displeased air, he added apologetically, “You know, sir, I should not have ventured to ask for more leave this year if you yourself had not been kind enough to propose it. And now my wife is longing for the promised change.”