Time passed between the day when she came to her decision and the day when they acted upon it, and she never knew how long it was nor how she spent it. She belonged to a living fact, and there were shadows in the world, such as her work, her mother, the silly detail of arranging to go away, and Stewart, a haunting shadow of one Sunday afternoon, but these were unrealities and only her idea was real. She never remembered how she put it to Sam, nor what he said, though she had a hazy memory that he was desperately shocked and more profoundly humorous than ever before. But she thought that he was only shocked as the right thing shocks by rightness, not as the wrong by wrongness: and she knew that difficulties melted: and they came.
They came to the Marbeck Inn and entered into their kingdom of a week.
CHAPTER XX—THE MARBECK INN
SAM was vilely dull about it all at first: his comprehension, stuck in the mud, failed utterly to rise to the occasion, but before long; he was looking back with horror on his turgid mental processes when she told him that they would come away together.
He had a shadow, not more than a shadow of excuse for his preposterous misunderstanding of her ease. Sam followed the crowd, accepted readymade their principles and their lack of principles, their morality and their immorality, and to the crowd he followed the theory was faithfulness and the practice as much licence as they could take without being found out. They made a boast rather than a secret of their affairs with a shopgirl or a typist, he had never had an affair and was flattered to think that he was to have one now.
He thought that an affair was rather a manly thing to have.
When Effie spoke, he had a great surprise, then cheapened her insultingly. He decided that he had been wrong about her. After all, she was nothing more than a pretty typist with whom he was going to have his first affair, who was going to give him the opportunity to join in that sly boasting in hotel smoke-rooms which was the habit of his crowd. He, too, would rank amongst the sportsmen.
But, even at his worst, he had the grace to doubt that this was of the same kind as those other affairs. It had a lowest common measure with them, but—Effie! Cheapen her as he would, he could not think of her as cheap enough for that. When others did this thing it was, surely, that they were giving rein to grossness: it was at least charitable to assume that the women of their amours were of coarser grain than their wives, and Effie’s was not the coarser grain. He drifted, acquiescing and puzzled, through the fog of his perplexity.