But she was always there.
He tried to reason with himself; he attempted to analyse Love.
“One cannot love a thing,” he told himself, “unless one has every reason to believe that it is perfection. A man, when he is deeply in love with a woman, must regard her as his ideal of womanhood. In his eyes she must be perfection; she must be flawless, even her faults he will not recognise as faults, but as perfections that are perhaps a little beyond his understanding—that’s all right. Now in the case of Joan, I see in her nothing to admire beyond the loveliness of her face, the grace of her, the sweet voice of her and—oh, her whole personality! But I know her to be mean-spirited and uncharitable, unforgiving, ungenerous. I know her to be all these, and yet—”
“Lady Linden, sir, and Miss Marjorie Linden!”
They had not met for weeks. Her ladyship had driven over in the large, comfortable carriage. “Give me a horse or, better still, two horses—things with brains, created by the Almighty, and not a thing that goes piff, piff, piff, and leaves an ungodly smell along the roads, to say nothing of the dust!”
So she had come here behind two fine horses, sleek and overfed.
“Hello!” she said.
“Hello!” said Hugh, and kissed her, and so the feud between them was ended.
“You are looking,” her ladyship said, “rotten!”
“I am looking exactly as I feel. How are you, Marjorie?” He held the small hand in his, and looked kindly, as he must ever look, into her pretty round face. Because she was blushing with the joy of seeing him, and because her eyes were bright as twin stars, he concluded that she was happy, and ascribed her happiness, not unnaturally considering everything, to Tom Arundel.