Once again she tried to extricate herself from the pressure of some mysterious current. There seemed no refuge left in Magdalen. There seemed very few comfortable people left in the world, to whom a miserable woman might turn. Only Wentworth. He did not know.
Perhaps Fay would never have turned to him if she had not first confided in and then shrunk from Magdalen. For the second time in her life she longed feverishly to get away from home, the home to which only a year ago she had been so glad to hurry back, when she had been so restlessly anxious to get away from Italy. Wentworth was beginning to look like a means of escape. The duke had at one time worn that aspect. Later on Michael had looked extremely like it for a moment. Now Wentworth was assuming that aspect in a more solid manner than either of his predecessors. She was slipping into love with him, half unconsciously, half with malice prepense. She told herself continually that she did not want to marry him or anyone, that she hated the very idea of marriage.
But her manner to Wentworth seemed hardly to be the outward reflection of these inward communings. And why did she conceal from Magdalen her now constant meetings with him?
Wentworth had by this time tested and found correct all his intimate knowledge of Woman, that knowledge which at first had not seemed to work out quite smoothly.
Nothing could be more flattering, more essentially womanly than Fay's demeanour to him had become since he had set her mind at rest as to his intentions on that idyllic afternoon after the storm. (How he had set her mind at rest on that occasion he knew best.) It seemed this exquisite nature only needed the sunshine of his unspoken assurance to respond with delighted tenderness to his refined, his cultured advances. He was already beginning to write imaginary letters to his friends, on the theme of his engagement: semi-humourous academic effusions as to how he, who had so long remained immune, had succumbed at last to feminine charm; how he, the determined celibate—Wentworth always called himself a celibate—had been taken captive after all. To judge by the letters which Wentworth conned over in his after-dinner mind, and especially one to Grenfell, the conclusion was irresistible to the meanest intellect that he had long waged a frightful struggle with the opposite sex to have remained a bachelor—a celibate, I mean—so long.
We have all different ways of enjoying ourselves. In the composition of these imaginary letters Wentworth tasted joy.
In these days Fay's boxes of primroses jostled each other in the postman's cart, on their way to cheer patients on their beds of pain in London hospitals.
Fay read the hurried, grateful notes of busy matrons, over and over again. They were a kind of anodyne.
On a blowing afternoon in the middle of April she made her way across the down with her basket to a distant hazel coppice to which she had not been as yet.