“No, not as Miss Katherine Trenchard—one day as Mrs. Philip Mark, perhaps.”
Katherine drew her hand from his, sat up, looked out to the deep blue line of sea, said, at last, quietly:
“Now please, Philip, explain the joke. The afternoon’s too lovely to be wasted.”
“There is no joke. I’m perfectly serious. I can’t stand it any longer. I cannot stand it—and when I say ‘it’ I mean the family, their treatment of me, their dislike of me, their determination to swallow me up in their feather-bed and make an end of me—the whole long engagement; you’re suffering. I’m suffering. You were wretched yesterday—so was I. When you’re wretched I could burn the whole family, Garth and Glebeshire and all included and waste no pity whatever.”
But Katherine only laughed:
“Do you know, Phil, you’re exaggerating the whole thing in the most ridiculous manner. It’s quite natural—it’s because you don’t know our habits and manners. Aunt Aggie lost her temper last night—we were all rather worked up—Sunday can be awful. She won’t lose her temper again. We had a quarrel. Well, I suppose all lovers have quarrels. You think they’ll all be terribly shocked because you let Henry drink too much that night in London. That shows that you simply don’t know the family at all, because if you did you’d know that it’s never shocked at anything that it hasn’t seen with its own eyes. Aunt Aggie saw Henry, so she was shocked—but for the others.... If they were to know—well, what you told me at Rafiel—then—perhaps—”
“Then?” Philip cried eagerly.
“They might be—I don’t know what they’d do.” She turned her eyes to his face again. “But you’re so impatient, Phil. You want everything to happen in a minute—You’re discontented because they all have their own lives, which you can’t share. But you’re so strange. I’m the person whose life you ought to share, and yet you don’t. You’ve hardly looked at all this. You’ve taken no interest at all in the fishermen or the villagers. Garth is nothing to you—”
“I hate Garth!” he broke out furiously. “I—” Then he dropped his voice. “That’ll all come later.... I’ll just say this about myself. It’s only what I’ve always told you, that I’m simply not worthy for you to care about me. You may have had some illusions about me at first. You can’t have any now. I’m weak and backboneless, always wanting things better than I can have them, ready to be influenced by simply anyone if they’re nice to me, hating it when people aren’t nice. I’m no good at all, except for one thing—my love for you.”
He bent forward and drew her towards him.