“If it hadn’t been for him? Tell me, if it hadn’t been for Gabriel Stanton it would have been me, wouldn’t it? You do like me a little, don’t you?”
It was impossible to keep him at a proper distance.
“Like you! not particularly. Why should I? You are very troublesome and presumptuous.”
She could not deal with him as she did with Gabriel. To this young country doctor, ten years before I knew him and he had acquired wisdom, men and women were just men and women, no more and no less. He had fallen headlong in love with Margaret, and when he saw he had, as he said, no chance, he could not be brought to believe that Gabriel Stanton was not her lover. He was demonstratively primitive, and many of his so-called medical visits she spent in fighting his advances. He knew that what she had to give she was giving to Gabriel Stanton, because she told him so, made no secret of it, but was for ever asking “If it hadn’t been for him? If you’d met me first?” One would have thought that Margaret, Gabriel’s “fair pale Margaret,” would have resented or at least tired of this rough persistent wooing, but if this were so there was nothing in her conduct to show it.
She said or wrote to Gabriel Stanton: “the very thought of physical love is repugnant to me, horrible.” Yet Peter kissed her hands, her feet, attempted her lips, made her fierce wild scenes. She called him a boy, but he was a year older than herself. Gabriel brought her books and the most reverent worship, was mindful of her slightest wish. He hoped that one day she would be his wife, but scarcely dared to say it, since once she put the matter aside, almost imploringly, growing pale, seeming afraid.
“Don’t talk to me of marriage, not yet. How can you? At least, wait!”
She spoke of her sensitiveness. But her sensitiveness was as a mountain to a mist compared with his.
She would tell him her most intimate thoughts, sit with him by dying fire or in gathering twilight, holding herself aloof. If, because he was so different from Peter Kennedy, she did sometimes try her woman’s wiles on him, she never moved him to depart from the programme or the principles she herself had laid down.
Another Sunday evening,—it was either the third or fourth of his coming,—sitting in the lamplight, after dinner, in the music room, after a long enervating day of mutual confidences and ever-growing intimacy, she tried to break through his defences. They had been talking of Nietzsche, not of his philosophy, but his life. She had been envying Nietzsche’s devoted sister and her opportunities when, suddenly and disingenuously, she startled Gabriel by saying:
“You are not a bit interested in what I am saying, you are thinking of something else all the time.”