A memory of Orta and its reeds and sunshine and love rose like a luminous mist between them....
She ran weeping from the room.
He leapt to his feet as the door closed. "Marjorie!" he cried.
But she did not hear him....
§ 3
The disillusionment about marriage which had discovered Trafford a thwarted, overworked, and worried man, had revealed Marjorie with time on her hands, superabundant imaginative energy, and no clear intimation of any occupation. With them, as with thousands of young couples in London to-day, the breadwinner was overworked, and the spending partner's duty was chiefly the negative one of not spending. You cannot consume your energies merely in not spending money. Do what she could, Marjorie could not contrive to make house and child fill the waking hours. She was far too active and irritable a being to be beneficial company all day for genial, bubble-blowing little Margharita; she could play with that young lady and lead her into ecstasies of excitement and delight, and she could see with an almost instinctive certainty when anything was going wrong; but for the rest that little life reposed far more beneficially upon the passive acquiescence of May, her pink and wholesome nurse. And the household generally was in the hands of a trustworthy cook-general, who maintained a tolerable routine. Marjorie did not dare to have an idea about food or domestic arrangements; if she touched that routine so much as with her little finger it sent up the bills. She could knock off butcher and greengrocer and do every scrap of household work that she could touch, in a couple of hours a day. She tried to find some work to fill her leisure; she suggested to Trafford that she might help him by writing up his Science Notes from rough pencil memoranda, but when it became clear that the first step to her doing this would be the purchase of a Remington typewriter and a special low table to carry it, he became bluntly discouraging. She thought of literary work, and sat down one day to write a short story and earn guineas, and was surprised to find that she knew nothing of any sort of human being about whom she could invent a story. She tried a cheap subscription at Mudie's and novels, and they filled her with a thirst for events; she tried needlework, and found her best efforts aesthetically feeble and despicable, and that her mind prowled above the silks and colours like a hungry wolf.
The early afternoons were the worst time, from two to four, before calling began. The devil was given great power over Marjorie's early afternoon. She could even envy her former home life then, and reflect that there, at any rate, one had a chance of a game or a quarrel with Daffy or Syd or Rom or Theodore. She would pull herself together and go out for a walk, and whichever way she went there were shops and shops and shops, a glittering array of tempting opportunities for spending money. Sometimes she would give way to spending exactly as a struggling drunkard decides to tipple. She would fix on some object, some object trivial and a little rare and not too costly, as being needed—when she knew perfectly well it wasn't needed—and choose the most remotest shops and display the exactest insistence upon her requirements. Sometimes she would get home from these raids without buying at all. After four the worst of the day was over; one could call on people or people might telephone and follow up with a call; and there was a chance of Trafford coming home....
One day at the Carmels' she found herself engaged in a vigorous flirtation with young Carmel. She hadn't noticed it coming on, but there she was in a windowseat talking quite closely to him. He said he was writing a play, a wonderful passionate play about St. Francis, and only she could inspire and advise him. Wasn't there some afternoon in the week when she sat and sewed, so that he might come and sit by her and read to her and talk to her? He made his request with a certain confidence, but it filled her with a righteous panic; she pulled him up with an abruptness that was almost inartistic. On her way home she was acutely ashamed of herself; this was the first time she had let any man but Trafford think he might be interesting to her, but once or twice on former occasions she had been on the verge of such provocative intimations. This sort of thing anyhow mustn't happen.
But if she didn't dress with any distinction—because of the cost—and didn't flirt and trail men in her wake, what was she to do at the afternoon gatherings which were now her chief form of social contact? What was going to bring people to her house? She knew that she was more than ordinarily beautiful and that she could talk well, but that does not count for much if you are rather dowdy, and quite uneventfully virtuous.
It became the refrain of all her thoughts that she must find something to do.