“That’s just it. I didn’t feel ‘poor Grace.’ I felt ‘plague-stricken—unclean Grace.’ And it began in me a lot of uncertainties. If she was like that—if marriage was as wretched and unreliable as she claimed—where can I turn for faith? You help restore faith but what if you are a shining exception?”
Anthony came in and stood against the door looking tall and immensely confident. Perhaps Marjorie felt he was the answer to Horatia’s appeal. Anyway she went away and sent them iced tea and sandwiches.
CHAPTER XX
AT just what point Horatia realized that Anthony still loved her and that his love could be called by no other name was quite cloudy in her own mind. Perhaps her first intimation of it came that very afternoon when he stood looking at her silently after Marjorie slipped away. It was a very revealing look and Horatia would have been stupid indeed not to have felt its quality. She pulled herself alert from the relaxed position she had been indulging in on the cushioned settee and put her hands laughingly to her disheveled hair.
“Please don’t embarrass me, Anthony. I know I’m tousled.”
“I love to look at you tousled. I love to look at you anyway and at any time. It’s all——” he stopped and pulled her to her feet, retrieving himself gaily. “Don’t bewitch me, young woman. Didn’t I get my orders not to be in love with you?”
But there was a tense look in his eyes that set Horatia wondering.
Five months ago she had been filled with humiliation and actual distaste by his declaration of love for her. Two months before, when she had first come to the country, she would have been revolted and frightened away. But the situation was changed. Anthony had grown to be a part of her life. And he was more skilful than he had been in the spring. He was very slow in his love-making, careful not to outrage her feelings, careful not to ask for anything. By words sometimes, but more often by the devotion of actions, by the constant protective care with which he surrounded her, Horatia was brought into consciousness of his love. It was easy for her because he asked for nothing. She could like him as much as she pleased and take comfort in the hundred intangible expressions of his love without feeling that she was involved in a love affair. And Jim was not there and his letters were few and repressed in tone. He was her lover—and she was his, thought Horatia, whether she was disappointed or not. That was her promise, but it seemed one which her mind insisted on rather than a conviction springing from the depth of her heart.
Accepting the love-making of two men is often possible, even to a fine, high-minded virtuous woman, if only fastidious ways save her from any sense of promiscuity. Anthony’s first attack coming in the spring, when Horatia was surrounded by the very present sense of Jim’s love, when she was fresh from his arms, had made her feel indecent. But now, removed from Jim, cooled and drawn little by little into a new atmosphere, Anthony’s love filled her at first with a gentle regret and then little by little, accepting his attentions and never finding the moment when she was both able and willing to tell him that she did not want him to care for her, there came to be a question about Anthony in her mind. It was, for instance, difficult to say to him when he was folding a wrap about her shoulders, “You must not be so considerate of me if your consideration means that you love me.” Yet, accepting publicly a hundred special attentions and thoughtfulnesses, seeing in Maud’s glances and in Marjorie’s what they hoped and expected, the thing lost its repugnant aspect. She could hardly feel that this devotion of Anthony’s which everyone approved of and which was so gentle a thing, could be shameful, especially when she was not reinforced by the expression of Jim’s love. Sometimes an unpleasant thought rose in her mind, contrasting this steady devotion, unreturned and unwelcomed, with the love of Jim which circumstances seemed to have so easily defeated. Yet it was significant that Anthony did not find a chance to make love to her openly and fervently and that she kept him from any declaration. One thing she knew very clearly—that she would hate to put Anthony definitely out of her life and that the moment of doing so could be postponed. Her sister did not plan to return until October. There was still a month before she need face issues. If she dabbled sometimes in the thought of Anthony’s life, that was only natural for he spread his plans before her. It would be an orderly, progressive life, fine, easeful and not selfish so much as concentrated on self-development.