Peter merely laughed, and, with an adroit movement, pushed away into midstream.
As Stuart walked slowly back to his hostess, he knew there was nothing he wanted so much as to be alone with Peter on the Broads. Certainly he had gone to a vast deal of trouble in bringing hither Mr. and Mrs. Strachey, for the sake of the proprieties. He was prepared to go to an equal amount of trouble in ridding himself of them. Nor would the charge of inconsistency have disturbed him a whit.
Meanwhile, Aureole had been deriving a quantity of fresh ideas from the contemplation of Stuart and Peter, and their treatment one of the other. She had never before seen love in conflict, and it struck her as attractive. An attempt to engage Oliver in a similarly slippery and perplexing wrestle of wills merely sufficed to augment his loving consideration; when Aureole was capricious, then Aureole had to be humoured, was the burden of his thoughts. From considering him a tyrant, a bully, and a gaoler, which was her last attitude but one, she veered round to the belief that she had married a poor-spirited creature. The germ within her, born of Nora Helmer’s rebellion, was feeding nicely and growing healthily plump, the past three days in Norfolk.
Aureole broke silence with a sudden: “Mr. Heron, do you think I’m happy?”
“No,” replied Stuart guardedly. And waited for more.
“She is!” Aureole let her eyes follow the disappearing craft that contained Peter. Then: “A man takes you for granted when you are once married to him. He pampers your body and neglects your soul.”
Stuart said: “You mean he pampers your soul as well as your body. A soul needs no pampering; it wants fresh air, and an occasional touch of the whip.” And he added musingly: “I’m a Pagan, you see!”
She made bitter reply: “Oliver is—just a man. That’s the difference.”
She had a way of half dropping her eyelids, and, after a pregnant silence, shooting forth an unexpected audacity, calculated to shatter the well-bred restraints of convention to a thousand fragments. Stuart had caught the trick, and found himself unable to refrain from using it upon her now: