“If we are to get to the East Neuk by teatime, we’d better be off; it’s four already.”
So they rode off, and very silent companions the Duke found them.
Seven years before in Simla, Mary had had a great success. She had been made much of, and had enjoyed it. Many men had made love to her, and she had enjoyed it. A beautiful, healthy girl accepts admiration as her natural right.
But the men who made love to her did not enjoy it, for many of them had the misfortune to be serious, and although Mary accepted their flowers and their compliments and their devotion in her own gay, gracious fashion, she gave nothing in return but that gay graciousness and the privilege of her society.
“If she were in love with that card-playing, drinking fool, her husband, I could understand it,” said Major Molyneux of the 42nd; “but she isn’t in love with him, not a bit; and yet she’s an icicle to every other chap. It’s not as if she were one of those cold, saint-in-a-shrine sort of women; she’s as human as she can be. She’s no fool, either. What, in heaven’s name, made her marry her husband?”
“Calm yourself, my dear Molly! Calm yourself,” answered the elderly civilian to whom he was unburdening himself. “You have yet to learn that the selective faculty is latest of development in women. Most women, especially if they are pretty, marry before it has developed at all. If they are good as well as pretty, they take care it shan’t develop afterwards.”
“Burton hasn’t even the grace to be jealous; he lets her do just what she pleases. He’s so mighty conceited that he never seems to think she may come across a man capable of understanding her.”
The commissioner smiled. “I don’t think much of Burton’s intellectual capacity, but I do give him credit for this—he understands his wife, and because he understands her, he trusts her absolutely. It’s no use, my dear boy, Simla will never have the pleasure of discussing Mrs. Burton in connection with any sort of scandal; she’s not that kind!”
The commissioner was right. Her husband never had reason to find fault with Mary, and since his death she had devoted herself to her boys and to the cultivation of her mind. She took it as a matter of course that men should fall in love with her; they always did. But her experience did not make her eager to investigate further the realms of marriage.