The remarkable fact was that Sam understood. His education had progressed and he knew that it was not for the Frump at the Inn that she shed the imitation wedding ring which for form’s sake he had suggested she should wear: it was for him. The ring was counterfeit, it was a false symbol of something which was not true: it had no place in the Marbeck scheme.
She curled up happily like a stroked cat, partly in sheer physical well-being, partly in gladness at her scheme’s success. “And to think,” she crooned, “that I am a wicked woman!”
“Effie,” he pleaded, taking her hand. “Don’t.”
“As if I care,” she said, rolling over on to her back and taking his hand with her to shade her eyes. “I might have been doing this all my life.” Indeed, in her perfect absence of embarrassment, she might. “Wicked!” She shied a stone after the wedding ring into the tarn and laughed at a world well lost. “The Frump won’t understand, my dear, but I think you do.”
“I think I do,” said Sam, but the fullness of understanding had not come to him yet.
Something, indeed, of her fineness he did perceive, but not its whole, its utter selflessness. He saw, roughly, what she was after: that it was here, in Westmoreland when she made her sacrifice, here when she lay beside him in the sun that she expressed in deed what she had been baffled to express in Manchester. She had brought him away from the murk and the fog and the place where they rather like dirt than otherwise because dirt means money, to where nature was beautiful. She had shown him beauty there, her beauty and the beauty of sacrifice and the beauty of things. She had taught him that there was beauty in the world. “We’ll never go back,” he cried.
“No. Not back,” she said. “But we will go to Manchester.”
“No. No. We’ll build a tabernacle here.”
“Here? No. We’ve been lawless here. We’ll go to Manchester.”
It rang in his ears like the trump of doom. So far they had marched in thought together, and he imagined that in her scheme they were to be together to the end. He thought her purpose was that they two were to work together to give shape to beauty—and no bad exercise in perception, either, for Sam Branstone.