He stared at her, his eyes intent and searching beneath puckered brows. It was a handsome, almost a beautiful face into which he looked: the softened light, the happy mood, even the floating ends of hair combined to give it an air of unusual youth. Nevertheless there were lines written thereon which told their own tale. Katrine noticed his scrutiny, and questioned him thereon:
“What are you thinking about?”
“You,” he said simply. “We are talking about ourselves. You are so young in many ways, younger than your years, but you look—”
“Older?”
“Yes,” he said again, serenely unconscious of offence. “It’s not a girl’s face. There are the marks of trouble, of suffering...”
Katrine sighed. On her lips flickered a smile which was strangely pathetic.
“Or of lack of trouble!” she corrected. “Oh, I mean it. It sounds incomprehensible to a man, but a woman would understand. Trouble would be easier to bear than the grey, monotonous routine month after month, year after year, which women have to live in small country towns. Trouble is educational and ennobling; monotony cramps growth at the roots. I am twenty-six, but there were women ten years older, still young, still pretty, jogtrotting along the same path, year after year, year after year. Nothing had happened to them! No man can understand all that that means. Nothing had happened!”
Bedford straightened himself significantly.
“They should make things happen!”
“Perhaps in time to come they may, when they are more developed—they, and their parents! Many well-to-do parents think that their daughters ought to be contented to stay peacefully at home and arrange the flowers. I had a real duty, but in some families nearby there were three or four women-girls pottering! I went to see one of them on her birthday last year. When I wished her many happy returns she shrank, as if I had hurt her. ‘Another year!’ she said. ‘Three hundred and sixty-five days... And all alike!’ It was fear that she felt, poor soul; fear of the blank! You can’t understand.”