That did not please him at all, though it was obviously intended to do so. She went on:
“But we’ll show them that we can do better on our own lines, won’t we? Father used to say that commerce was sordid however honest you tried to be, and after all, it isn’t work for a first-rate man, is it?”
Her insistence on his success and abilities worried him. It was not for this he had been waiting. He wanted her to tell him what had brought her to her abrupt decision to be married sooner than they had planned. He tried to lead her on to that but could bring her to no other intimacy than that of little caresses with her hands. He would not admit his disappointment, and all through the four hours’ journey kept on telling himself that he was glad to see her. And indeed he was glad. Her coming brought the promised future nearer.
She gave him no time to ponder his disappointment or the hole it knocked in his brooding pleasure. They chose a house, fifty pounds a year, with a garden, in Galt’s Park. He took his mother to see it, and she assumed the manner she had had in the old days for the visits of the “rich Fourmys.”
A fortnight’s shopping furnished the house, and he had the satisfaction of supplying the furniture for his study out of a check sent by his Aunt Janet. The trousseau took another three weeks, and Mrs. Brock, with an eye to wedding presents, would not hear of the day being fixed until after an interval of six weeks. A miserable time. Linda seemed to think of everything but her bridegroom.
For the honeymoon the Yorkshire coast was chosen, by whom it was not very clear. René had wanted Derbyshire; Linda had proposed the Lakes, but, a fortnight before the marriage, Mrs. Smallman had appeared on the scene and taken charge, instructed them, tactfully and almost tacitly, in the correct deportment of those about to be married. She kept the couple apart, spent days and evenings with Linda, and made her keep René distracted. The Smallmans had spent their honeymoon on the Yorkshire coast; they knew of a charming little private hotel overlooking Ravenscar; theirs had been the perfect honeymoon, one which had never come to an end. So might—must—it be with René’s; and so it would be if goodwill, advice, kindly glances, friendly instruction, could bring it about. The Professor expanded:
“It is wonderful when all that you have loved in a dream, as it were, materializes and is there in your hands. Only you feel so confoundedly unworthy. And then, when you are married and settled down, you get so abominably accustomed to it. No one could be more devoted than my wife and I, but we find that if we do not keep ourselves alive with outside interests, we begin to wear each other down. It isn’t easy—marriage. I can say all this now, because if I don’t I never shall. And, after all, you know, I like you, Fourmy. We shall work together and be good friends, but we lose something, you know. A certain kind of intimacy we can never have again.”
This talk reminded René of the occasion when George had taken him as a small boy to the swimming baths, made him stand on the edge practicing strokes, and then pushed him into the deep end.
The night before his departure, his mother came into his room and sat on his bed and looked long at him:
“I can’t bear to think of your bed empty to-morrow,” she said.