David was oddly shaken by this extraordinary inspiration. He did not think of it as an idea: it was an obsession. Once in his mind, he could think of nothing else, nor did he wish to think of anything else. Under his desultory rambling conversations with Jim Rucker, during their dinner, and while he was trying to read afterward, the insidious sweetness of this astonishing vision persisted. David abandoned himself to it over and over, as he might have done to some subtle and dream-provoking drug.
He always imagined his homecoming to Wastewater, to find Gay in the sitting room, sitting alone by the fire. He would come in to her, and she would raise to his those beautiful, serious eyes, and he would hear that husky, sweet voice in greeting. Sometimes the mere pleasure of this much so intrigued David that he was obliged to go back to the beginning and picture it all over again: the upstairs sitting room, the drowsy coal fire in the steel-rodded grate; Uncle Roger’s smiling picture, with the favourite horse and the greyhound, looking down from above the mantel.
Then they would talk a little about her mother and Aunt Flora and Sylvia, and then David would say unexpectedly: “I’ve thought of a wonderful solution for you and all your troubles, dear old Gay. I want you to marry me.” And when David reached this point in his dream, he had to stop short. An odd, happy sort of suffocation would envelop him, something that had nothing to do with love, but that seemed sheer emotion, by a realization of the poignant dramatic beauty of the scene.
To be sure, David had said almost these very words to Sylvia only a few months before. But strangely, strangely!—they had not seemed to have anything in common with the same phrases when addressed to Gay. In the first place, for ten years he had been steadily and admiringly moving toward the day of his marriage to Sylvia. He had administered her fortune with that in view, and being at this moment under a flexible sort of promise to marry Sylvia, an “understanding” that was to be made more definite presently, only if she so decreed, he had given some concerned thought a few months before to his future status as the husband of a rich young wife, as a money-hating, society-hating, display-hating painter married to a girl of twenty-one who might quite naturally be expected to enjoy her money and the social advantages it would give her.
David even now thought of himself as loving Sylvia and of being the proper mate for her. But Sylvia did not love him, or if she did, she also loved the thought of her independence, of travel with her mother. They had always thought they loved each other, and, there being no change now in his feeling toward her, David quite honestly believed that he loved her still.
But part of his plan for Gay included an explanation to Sylvia of the complications of the situation. Oddly enough, David did not dwell, in his thoughts, upon this explanation. There was no thrill in imagining that. He thought of it hurriedly; Sylvia beautiful and understanding, of course; Sylvia saying, “Why, certainly, David. It does solve everything for poor little Gay, and is much the wisest arrangement all round!”
That would be gotten through as briefly as possible; probably by letter, or perhaps David could see her for a moment at college. And immediately this was over, he would be free for that strangely thrilling scene with Gay—a scene of which he did not think as connected with love-making in any way. He had “loved” Sylvia for years, and there was none of that feeling here. No, this was just an inspired solution of poor little Gay’s affairs.
For however wise and charming, she was not the type of girl who battles, or who wishes to battle, successfully with the world. She was alone, poor, nameless, and beautiful, and David shuddered as he thought what life might add to her present load of troubles and wrongs.
On the other hand, it would be excruciating to her to live along indefinitely at Wastewater. She would be dependent upon Sylvia, she would have no real place in the family, and on every side would be constant reminders of her mother’s unhappy life and of her own illegitimacy.
But—married to him, established in the sunshiny little farmhouse in Keyport where he kept a sort of studio—Mrs. David Fleming——!