“Suits you!” she cried incredulously, and he told her why of all the things she might have been she was the one which definitely wiped out all possibility of his return to Staithley. They couldn’t force him there with a Bradshaw for his wife, they would be the first to cry out that it wouldn’t do: she was his master-card, Mary, whom he loved; she was Mary Arden and tremendously a catch; she was Mary Bradshaw, his sure defense against the rigid expectations of the Hepplestalls and... oh, uncounted things besides. “And I apologize,” he said, “I apologize for arguing, for dragging in the surrounding circumstance. But you tell me you’re Bradshaw as if it unmade us and I tell you it’s the best touch in the making of us.”
She wasn’t sure of that. She was idiosyncratic and peculiar herself in wishing to go back to Staithley, but she felt that her dream, though she had stripped it of romantic hate, yet stood for something sounder than his mere obstinate refusal to return. He left himself in air; he was a negative; rejecting Staithley, he had no plans of what he was to do after the war.
But that was to prejudge him, it was certainly to calculate, and she had calculated too much in her life. Caution be hanged! There was a place for wildness.
They would say, of course, that she was marrying for position. Let them say: she would, certainly, be Lady Hepplestall, but at what a discount! To be Lady Hep-plestall and not to live in Lancashire, in the one place where the significance of being Hepplestall was grasped in full! It was like marrying a king in exile, it was like receiving a rope of pearls upon condition that she never wore them. It excluded the pungent climax of Mary Ellen as Mistress of Staithley Hall.
Her dream had set, indeed, in a painted sky, but she would not linger in gaze upon its afterglow; she was not looking at sunset but at dawn, and raised her eyes to his. She discovered that she was being kissed. She had the sensation, ecstatic and poignant, surrendering and triumphant, of being kissed by the man she loved.
She had not, hitherto, conceived a high opinion of kissing. On the stage and off, it was a professional convention, fractionally more expressive than a handshake. This was radically different; this was, tinglingly, vividly, to feel, to be aware of herself and, through their lips, of him. She had the exaltation of the giver who gives without reserve, and from up there, bemused in happiness, star-high with Rupert’s kiss and her renunciations, she fell through space when he unclasped her and said with brisk assurance, “Engagement ring before lunch. License after lundi. That’s a reasonable program, isn’t it?”
Perhaps it was reasonable to a time-pressed man whose leave could now be counted by the hour. Perhaps she hadn’t seen that there is only one first kiss. It came, and no matter what the sequel held, went lonely, unmatched, unique. What passion-laden words could she expect from him to lengthen a moment that was gone?
It wasn’t he who was failing’ her, it was herself who must, pat upon their incomparable moment, be criticizing him because he was not miraculous but practical. And this was thought, a sickly thing, when her business was to feel, it was opposition when her business was surrender. The wild thing was the right thing now. She purged herself of thought.
“Yes,” she said. She was to marry. Marry. And then he would go back to France; but first he was to find comfort in her arms.