“What’s forty! Margaret is twenty-eight, herself.”
“Well! bless her, there’s a lifetime of happiness before her and I’ll gild it.”
“The drawing-room will take a grand piano.”
“That’s good.”
“And I’ve settled to give her the house linen myself.”
“No place for a car, I suppose. In an out-of-the-way place like that she’ll need a car.”
So they planned for her; having suffered in her suffering and eclipse, and eager now to make up to her for them, as indeed they had always been. Only in the bitter past it proved difficult because her sensitiveness had baffled them. It was that which had kept her bound so long. All that could be done had been done, to arrange a divorce via lawyers through Edgar B.’s cheque-book. But James Capel, when it came to the end, proved that he cared less for money than for limelight, and had defended the suit recklessly with the help of an unscrupulous attorney. The nightmare of the case was soon over, but the shadow of it had darkened many of their days. This wedding was really the end and would put the coping stone on their content.
Neither Edgar B. nor his wife heard anything of the attempt at blackmail. Gabriel, of course, did not tell them. Margaret, strange as it may sound, had forgotten all about it! Something had given an impetus to her feeling for Gabriel: and now it was at its flood tide. She had written once, “Men do not love good women, they have a high opinion of them.” She would not have written it now, she herself had found goodness lovable. Gabriel Stanton was a better man than she had ever met. He was totally unlike an American, and had scruples even about making money.
Her father and he, discoursing one evening upon commercial morality, she found that they spoke different languages, and could arrive at no understanding. But she discovered in herself a linguistic gift and so saw through her father’s subtlety into Gabriel’s simplicity. She knew then that the man who enthralled her was the type of which she had read with interest, and written with enthusiasm, but never before encountered. An English gentleman! With this in her consciousness she could permit herself to revel in all his other attractions, his lean vigour and easy movements, shapely hands and deep-set eyes under the thin straight brows. His mouth was an inflexible line when his face was in repose. When he smiled at her the asceticism vanished. He smiled at her very often in these strange full days. The days hurried past, there was little time for private conversation, an orgy of buying held them.
Margaret, yielding to pressure and inclination, stayed on and on until the week passed and the next one was broken in upon. Now it was Tuesday and there was only one more week. One more week! Sometimes it seemed incredible. Always it seemed as if the sun was shining and the light growing more intense, blinding. She moved toward it unsteadily. This semi-American atmosphere into which she and her lover had become absorbed was an atmosphere of hustle, kaleidoscopic, shifting.