Mrs. Wells evidently looked upon this speech as a particularly choice specimen of humour. "Well, there now! I never!" was her good-humoured comment. "If I can't make friends with this young lady, sir, I think I shall deserve to be turned out, if I have served you for a goodish while. He thinks to tease you and me, ma'am, don't he?"
The new mistress had a deft smile all ready. "Indeed, Mrs. Wells, I think he is fond of teasing," she said; and, as so often, the cadence of her voice reminded him unbearably of the woman who had forsaken him, hardened his heart, and drove him away, hostile and irritated.
Mrs. Wells proceeded to make Virginia welcome. Grover had evidently carried down a good report of the new arrival. The housekeeper took her lady round dairy, scullery, store-room and larder, and was soon impressed with her thorough knowledge of the workings of a gentleman's country household.
"Bless me, to look at her you'd never think it!" she declared afterwards. "Just like one of the coloured plates in the fashion papers, or a wax doll with the paper just off of it. But what she don't know about churning ain't worth learning; and as to bread and cakes—why, you'd think she had kept house all her life, and it's my belief she has too—ever since she was old enough to have the sense for it."
*****
At half-past ten, when Gaunt strolled into the hall, his wife, in a shady hat and with a white sunshade, was descending the stairs. Her unquestioning submission—the punctuality which left him no ground for any kind of complaint—was annoying. He felt that the ground was being fairly cut away under his feet, and decided that he must make it clear that a mere policy of yielding would not exempt her from the discipline he meant to inflict.
They left the house together and, turning to the left among the thick pines, soon found a gate which let them through into the sunny meadowland.
They first visited the stables, the barnyards, and the orchards. Then descending the slope, they came to the cattle in the pastures. Beyond this again was cornland, and the fields were beginning to grow faintly golden with the promise of harvest.
Mindful of his sneer at her "prattle" Virginia said little; but he could not but recognise, from what she did say, that she knew what she was talking about. She asked one or two questions about his manures, which touched upon the very point that just now interested him keenly. He was almost as much surprised as if she had begun to speak to him in Arabic. More clearly than ever he was beginning to perceive that this was not by any means the woman he had expected. Yet he hardened his heart. He gazed upon her elegance, her fragility, her Dresden china fairness, and told himself she was merely cleverer than he had foreseen. The agricultural interest was just a pose, meant to conciliate him. She had, apparently, more than one weapon up her sleeve. She intended his conquest, and was planning her campaign accordingly. As for him, he felt as a man may who has been taught only English methods of self-defence when confronted for the first time with a professor of Jiu-jitsu.
He had planned for himself the gratification of breaking in to a life of country solitude a second Virginia Sheringham. He had thought that he knew and understood the methods which would be most effective. He had his victim in his power, but behold! It was not merely not Virginia Sheringham, it was nobody in the least like her. More than once already he had been visited by the notion that he was behaving like a brute, that he was bullying a defenceless thing. Such a thought was intolerable. It simply could not be true. If it were, what outcome to the situation was there? No. It was not true. This submissiveness, this helpless passivity, was merely the policy of reculer pour mieux sauter. She had some desperate plan in her head—meant, perhaps, to escape? He must be ready.