Peter had plenty of time for considering where he found himself that afternoon, for the ladies were bent on a shopping expedition on which they had rather pointedly given him to understand he was not expected to attend. He had tried that once, and had hit upon the excellent device, in face of the outrageous prices proposed by the dealers, of having them settle upon what they would like and sending Luigi back to bargain for it. All of which would have gone very well if Mrs. Merrithew, in the delight of his amazing success, had not gone back to the shop the next day to duplicate his purchases. Peter had never heard what occurred on that occasion, but he had noticed that they never talked in his presence of buying anything again. Bloombury people, he should have remembered, had perfectly definite notions about having things done for them.
He walked, therefore, on this afternoon in the Public Gardens and tried to reconstruct in their original force the reasons for his not marrying Savilla Dassonville. They had come upon him overwhelmingly in the recrudescence of memory, reasons rooted very simply in his man's hunger for the lift, the dizzying eminence of desire. He liked the girl well enough but he did not want her as he had wanted Eunice Goodward, as he wanted expansively at this moment to want something, somebody—who was not Eunice—he was perfectly clear on this point—but should be in a measure all she stood for to him. He had renewed in the night, though in so short a time, not less acutely, all the wounded misery of what Eunice had forced upon him. He was there between the dark and dawn, and here again in the cool of the garden, to taste the full bitterness of the conviction that he was not good enough to be loved. He was not to be helped from that by the thought, which came hurrying on the heels of the other, that Savilla Dassonville loved him. He had a moment of almost hating her as she seemed to plead with him, by no motion of her own he was obliged to confess for those raptures, leaping fires, winged rushes, which should have been his portion of their situation.
He hated her for the certainty that if he went away now quietly without saying anything, it would be to visit on her undeservedly all that had come to him from Eunice. For she would know; she would not, as he had been, be blind to the point of requiring the spoken word. If he left her now it would be to the unavoidable knowledge that, as the Princess had said of him, he would be running away. He would be running from the evidences of a moneyless, self-abnegating youth, from the plain surfaces of efficiency and womanliness, not hedged about and enfolded, but pushed to the extremity of its use. He had, however, when he had taken that in from every side, the grace to be ashamed of it.
He was ashamed, too, of finding himself at their next meeting involved in a wordless appeal to be helped from his state to some larger grounds. If the girl had but appealed to him he could have done with a fine generosity what he felt was beyond him to invite. He could have married Savilla Dassonville to be kind to her; what he didn't enjoy was putting it on a basis of her being kind to him.
Miss Dassonville, however, afforded him no help beyond the negative one of not talking too much and taking perhaps a shade less interest in Venice. They had two quiet days together in which it was evident, whatever Peter settled with himself as to his relation to the girl, it had taken on for Mrs. Merrithew the pointedness known in Bloombury as "attentions." She paid in to the possibilities of the situation the tribute of her absence for long sessions in which, so far as Peter could discover, the situation rather fell to the ground. It began to appear that he had missed as he was doomed with women, the crucial instant, and was to come out of this as of other encounters, empty. And then quite suddenly the girl put out a hand to him.
It was along about the end of the afternoon they had come out of the church of Saint George the Greater, which as being most accessible had been left to the latter end of their explorations. Mrs. Merrithew had just sent Giuseppe back for a shawl which she had dropped in the cloister. They sat rocking in the gondola looking toward the fairy arcade of the ducal palace and the pillars of the saints, and suddenly Miss Dassonville spoke to excuse her quietness.
"I must look all I can," she said; "we are leaving the day after to-morrow."
If she had retired behind Mrs. Merrithew's comfortable breadth in order to deliver her shot the more effectively, she missed seeing how plumply it landed in the midst of Peter's defences and scattered them.
"Leaving Venice?" he said. "Leaving me?" It took a moment for that fact, dropping the depth of his indecision, to show him where he stood. "But I thought you understood," he protested, "that I wanted you to stay ... to stay with me...." He leaned across Mrs. Merrithew's broad lap in a great fear of not being sufficiently plain. "Make her understand," he said, "that I want her to stay always."
"I guess," said Mrs. Merrithew, a dry smile twinkling in the placidity of her countenance, "you'd better take me right home first, and then you can explain to her yourself."