‘It’s a year since your last visit to us, isn’t it?’
Sheila found her voice, a very small voice now, and answered ‘Yes.’
‘Well, a year ago I made up my mind to ask you to marry me. Will you?’
There was a teeming silence. Sheila’s mind was in a whirl. There seemed something wanting in the richness of this moment, a disconcerting gap in the happiness that had come within her reach. But another feeling conquered. She looked at him with her heart in her eyes.
‘If I can help you.... Oh, Edward, I do want to help you!’
‘My dear!’ he said. He kissed her cheek in warm brotherly fashion. ‘We shall be very happy together, you and I.’ He took her hand in his.
For a moment they contemplated this prospective happiness without speaking. The gong summoned them to dinner.
Sheila accompanied Edward into the house with a numbed feeling in one corner of her mind. She could not banish a vague half-formed doubt that had crept into the heart of her new happiness. There was so much that was fine, so much that was bracing, about her relationship with Edward, and she told herself that this lurking discontent was mere perversity. A feeling of comradeliness struggled with a sense of chill. She was to be his friend, his wife, the partner of his life’s work; they were intellectually in tune: what more could she ask of life? What was this secret craving for tenderness, for romance, but a foolish lapse into the sentimental dreaming of her school-days? Edward offered her in abundance what that boy-lover Kay Wilton had been so conspicuously unable to offer: the sympathy of an alert mind. Sympathy and comradeship—were not these the fairest flowers of life? The rest were gaudy hothouse plants, nurtured in an artificial warmth and unable to endure the healthy rigours of continual daily intimacy.
She tried by such reflections to still the whispering voice within her; nevertheless she was not herself during dinner, and it was with a catch of the breath, afterwards, that she heard Edward announce their betrothal to his parents. Stated coldly, the compact had the terrifying air of something irrevocable. She controlled with effort an impulse to flee from the room.