She had time, while he was at Staithley, to come to terms with his disclosure. In the restaurant, when it came upon her suddenly, it had sent her, certainly, heels over head, but, soberly considered, she began to ask herself what there was in it that should disconcert her. She was Bradshaw and he a Hepplestall and she believed that without effort, merely by not discouraging him, she could make him marry her. What could be neater? What revenge more exquisite upon the Hepplestalls than Mary Ellen Bradshaw, Lady Hepplestall?
True—if she hated them. But her hatred, reexamined, seemed a visionary thing; at the most it was romantic decoration to a fact and in this mood of inquisition Mary sought facts without their trimmings. She sought her hatred of the Hepplestalls and found she had no hatred in her.
She raised her eyes to the photograph of Staithley Edge. Yes, that was authentic feeling, that passion for the Staithley hills, but she didn’t want to go there in order to take the shine out of the Hepplestalls. She had romanticized that feeling, she had made hatred the excuse for her ambition, so arbitrary in an actress with a vogue, to go back to live bleakly amongst smoke-tarnished moors. Rupert, for instance, was firmly set against return.
It was deflating, like losing a diamond ring, and she did not humble herself to the belief that the diamond had never been there. It had, in the clan-hatred of the Bradshaws, but she had been stagey about it. She had magnified a childish memory into a living vendetta and, scrutinized to-day, she saw it as a tinsel wrapping, crumbling at exposure to daylight, round her sane sweet passion for the hills: and the conclusion was that Rupert Hepplestall meant no more to her than Rupert Fairy—or little more. She had mischief enough in her to savor the thought of Mary Ellen squired in London by Sir Rupert Hepplestall and decided that if he wanted to take his orders from her for the period of his leave, she would take particular pleasure in ordering him imperiously.
She calculated, she thought, with comprehensiveness, but missed two factors, one (which she should have remembered) that Rupert had seemed lovable, the other (which she could not guess) that he returned from Staithley to begin his serious wooing. He laid siege before defenses which she had deliberately weakened by her re-orientation of her facts.
One day, before he must go back to France, he spoke outright of love. If he hadn’t, half a dozen times, declared himself, then he didn’t know what mute announcement was, but leave was running out and addressing silent questions to a sphinx left him a long way short of tangible result.
“Oh, love!” she jeered. “What’s love?”
“I can tell you that,” he said, “better than I could ten days ago. Love’s selfishness à deux. I’m one of the two and my idea of love is finding comfort in your arms.”
She thought it a good answer, so good that it brought her to her feet and to (they were in her flat) the drawer in her desk where she had hidden a photograph. Holding it to him, “Do you recognize that?” she asked. “The other day, when we were talking, I said I had no people and—”
“Was that mattering before the war? I’m sure it doesn’t matter now,” he said.