Susie was not pretty, but she had eyes like Aggie’s.
III
After all, Susie was married before her eldest sister; for Aggie had to wait till Arthur’s salary rose. He thought it was going to rise at midsummer, or if not at midsummer, then at Michaelmas. But midsummer and Michaelmas passed, Christmas and Easter, too, and Arthur’s salary showed no sign of rising. He daren’t tell Aggie that he had been obliged to leave off reading Latin in the evenings, and was working feverishly at shorthand in order to increase his efficiency. His efficiency increased, but not his salary.
Meanwhile he spent all his holidays at Queningford, and Aggie had been twice to town. They saw so little of each other that every meeting was a divine event, a spiritual adventure. If each was not exactly an undiscovered country to the other, there was always some territory left over from last time, endlessly alluring to the pilgrim lover. Whenever Arthur found in Aggie’s mind a little bare spot that needed cultivating, he planted there a picture or a poem, that instantly took root, and began to bloom as it had never (to his eyes) bloomed in any other soil. Aggie, for her part, yielded all the treasure of her little kingdom as tribute to the empire that had won her.
Many things were uncertain, the rise of Arthur’s salary among them; but of one thing they were sure, that they would lead the intellectual life together. Whatever happened, they would keep it up.
They were keeping it up as late as August, when Arthur came down for the Bank Holiday. He was still enthusiastic, but uncertainty had dimmed his hope. Marriage had become a magnificent phantasm, superimposed upon a dream, a purely supposititious rise of salary. The prospect had removed itself so far in time that it had parted with its substance, like an object retired modestly into space.
They were walking together in the Queningford fields, when Arthur stopped suddenly and turned to her.
“Aggie,” he said, “supposing, after all, we can never marry?”
“Well,” said Aggie, calmly, “if we don’t we shall still lead our real life together.