He meant it to be endearing. As he had sailed up and down the world, a hundred ports had offered him a hundred adventures, all light in the scales of purpose, but not all bad. He had gossiped and idled and coquetted with beauty before; but this was different, because the nature of the girl was different from all others he had met. It had mostly been lightly come and lightly go with himself, as with the women it had been easily won and easily loosed. Conscience had not smitten him hard, because beauty, as he had known it, though often fair and of good report, had bloomed for others before he came. But here was a nature fresh and unspoiled from the hand of the potter Life.
As her head slightly turned from him again, he involuntarily noticed the pulse beating in her neck, the rise and fall of her bosom. Life—here was life unpoisoned by one drop of ill thought or light experience.
“Thou dost command men too,” he repeated.
She stepped forward a little from the doorway and beyond him, answering back at him:
“Oh, no, I only knit, and keep a garden, and command a little home, that’s all.... Won’t you let me show you the island?” she added quickly, pointing to a hillock beyond, and moving towards it. He followed, speaking over her shoulder:
“That’s what you seem to do,” he answered, “not what you do.” Then he added rhetorically: “I’ve seen a man polishing the buckle of his shoe, and he was planning to take a city or manoeuvre a fleet.”
She noticed that he had dropped the thou, and, much as its use had embarrassed her, the gap left when the boldness was withdrawn became filled with regret, for, though no one had dared to say it to her before, somehow it seemed not rude on Philip’s lips. Philip? Yes, Philip she had called him in her childhood, and the name had been carried on into her girlhood—he had always been Philip to her.
“No, girls don’t think like that, and they don’t do big things,” she replied. “When I polish the pans”—she laughed—“and when I scour my buckles, I just think of pans and buckles.” She tossed up her fingers lightly, with a perfect charm of archness.
He was very close to her now. “But girls have dreams, they have memories.”
“If women hadn’t memory,” she answered, “they wouldn’t have much, would they? We can’t take cities and manoeuvre fleets.” She laughed a little ironically. “I wonder that we think at all or have anything to think about, except the kitchen and the garden, and baking and scouring and spinning”—she paused slightly, her voice lowered a little—“and the sea, and the work that men do round us.... Do you ever go into a market?” she added suddenly.