Mary went off in great elation. "I don't know when I have felt so happy as to-day," she declared, as she kissed him. "I leave my best love for the work—and for the lady as well," she added, smiling.
It was arranged on the door-step that they should travel down to Hertfordshire together, and Mary insisted he must leave her to look up the trains, and make all the arrangements.
"It is just the sort of task I enjoy," she assured him. "Looking up trains to get into the country always sends me into a sort of happy excitement; it is part of the joy of anticipation."
Wyndham was left, somehow, a greater admirer of Miss Robinson. He studied her again in his own picture, and accepted her as a far finer creature than he had realised—even allowing for this idealisation of her in paint. "My feeling against her must be purely morbid, and it's really too bad when she likes my society so much!—she has no idea how much she shows it." Her unsophistication, hitherto a deficiency, began to take on a certain charm. How refreshing this womanly simplicity in a world of showy coquettes and chattering, feather-headed females! Even Mary, who was so shrewd and fastidious, had been compelled to pay her homage. The Robinson family was charming! What fine old-world courtesy in the father—many a born aristocrat might well take a lesson from him! How unassuming, too, the mother, full of quiet virtues and womanly excellencies!
And Mary's significant smile remained with him. Good gracious! was she, too, taking the sort of thing for granted? This power of suggestion from every side was annoying: still—it would not be right to let that prejudice him!
Wyndham paced to and fro feverishly. Why should he not——?
It was the first time he was impelled to put the question to himself in clear seeking. Obscure in his mind these last weeks, it crystallised itself brusquely—surprised him with its swift definiteness: but he broke it off, all unprepared to meet it yet. He had a shamefaced remembrance of his matrimonial conversation with Sadler, of the lofty convictions he had then expressed.
Well, he had spoken honestly, he argued, and his convictions had changed not a jot. "Only now that I am face to face with the actual possibility, I see aspects of the case that then escaped me. Till now I have always viewed marriage as the great central fact to which the whole of life has to converge, from which everything else takes its significance. Hence it was a case of the ideal or nothing—there seemed no other choice. But now I recognise that matrimony that is not ideal may yet take its place as an accessory to life, may be accepted as a good without filling the whole horizon."
He resumed his feverish pacing. Well, why should he not seize an opportunity which presented itself so favourably? By the loss of his money he had become reduced in his own world to the rank of a mere "detrimental." Had he not already felt that sufficiently? He laughed harshly at the memory. No, no, a Lady Betty he could not hope to marry. Such wondrous beings did not grow on every bush; nor did life permit of his setting out in search of one. This holding out for the perfect ideal only meant humiliation and sadness in the end. The world—the hard world of fact—was like that, and you had to take it as you found it. No folly could be greater than to forget that life was as it was, and not as you thought it ought to be!
Yet he vacillated again. Did he really want to marry at all? Had he not decided—wholly, absolutely, irrevocably—that his business in life was work? Though he would never have spoken of it to another, he was proud in his heart of his sentimental loyalty to Lady Betty, and marriage seemed almost an unfaithfulness. Better perhaps to bend himself sternly to the task before him!