“Isn’t it chiefly a matter of courage?” I asked. “It isn’t as if … the mésalliance were in any way disgraceful.”
I can’t absolve myself from the charge of hypocrisy in the making of that speech. I was thinking of Jervaise and Anne, and I did not for one moment believe that Anne would ever marry him. My purpose was, I think, well-intentioned. I honestly believed that it would be good for him to fall in love with Anne and challenge the world of his people’s opinion for her sake. But I blame myself, now, for a quite detestable lack of sincerity in pushing him on. I should not have done it if I had thought he had a real chance with her. Life is very difficult; especially for the well-intentioned.
Jervaise shrugged his shoulders. “It’s all so infernally complicated by this affair of Brenda’s,” he said.
Yet it has seemed simple enough to him, I reflected, an hour before. “Kick him and bring her home,” had been his ready solution of the difficulties he thought were before us. Evidently Anne’s behaviour during our talk at the farm had had a considerable effect upon his opinions. That, and the moon. I feel strongly inclined to include the moon—lazily declining now towards the ambush of a tumulus-shaped hill, crowned, as is the manner of that country, with a pert little top-knot of trees.
“Complicated or simplified?” I suggested.
“Complicated; damnably complicated,” he replied irritably. “Brenda’s a little fool. It isn’t as if she were in earnest.”
“Then you don’t honestly believe that she’s in love with Banks?” I asked, remembering his “I don’t know. How can any one know,” of a few minutes earlier.
“She’s so utterly unreliable—in every way,” he equivocated. “She always has been. She isn’t the least like the rest of us.”
“Don’t you count yourself as another exception?” I asked.
“Not in that way, Brenda’s way,” he said. “She’s scatter-brained; you can’t get round that. Going off after the dance in that idiotic way. It’s maddening.”