Mrs. Lester was not at all insincere. She liked Maradick very much, and her having liked Captain Stanton and Mr. Stapylton before him made no difference at all. Those others had been very innocent flirtations and no harm whatever had come of them, and then Treliss was such an exciting place that things always did happen. It must also be remembered that she had that morning quarrelled with her husband.
“You see,” she said, “I suppose I was always rather a romantic girl. I loved colour and processions and flowers and the Roman Catholic Church. I used to go into the Brompton Oratory and watch the misty candles and listen to them singing from behind the altars and sniff the incense. And then I read Gautier and Merimée and anything about Spain. And then I went to Italy, and I thought I could never leave it with the dear donkeys and Venice and carnivals, but we had to get back for Ascot. Oh! I suppose it was all very silly and like lots of other girls, but it was all very genuine, Mr. Maradick.”
He nodded his head.
“It’s so sweet of you to understand,” she said. “Well, like most girls, I crowded all these dreams into marriage. That was going to do everything for me. Oh! he was to be such a hero, and I was to be such a wife to him. Dear me! How old it makes one feel when one thinks of those girlish days!”
But Maradick only thought that she looked very young indeed, Tony’s age.
“Then I read some of Fred’s essays; Mr. Lester, you know. They used to come out in the Cornhill, and I thought them simply wonderful. They said all that I had been thinking, and they were full of that colour that I loved so. The more I read them the more I felt that here was my hero, the man whom I could worship all my days. Poor old Fred, fancy my thinking that about him.”
Maradick thought of Mr. Lester trailing with bent back and languid eye over the gorse, and wondered too.
“Well, then I met him at a party; one of those literary parties that I used to go to. He was at his best that night and he talked wonderfully. We were introduced, and—well, there it all was. It all happened in a moment. I couldn’t in the least tell you how; but I woke one morning and, like Mr. Somebody or other, a poet I think, found myself married.”
Here there was a dramatic pause. Maradick didn’t know what to say. He felt vaguely that sympathy was needed, but it was difficult to find the right words.
“That changed me,” Mrs. Lester went on in a low voice with a thrill in it, “from an innocent warm-hearted girl into a woman—a suffering, experienced woman. Oh! Mr. Maradick, you know what marriage is, the cage that it can be; at least, if you haven’t experienced it, and I sincerely hope you haven’t, you can imagine what it is. A year of it was enough to show me how cruel life was.”