“He was splendid. Poor, dear old Jethro! You wouldn’t understand. You’ll only laugh. You always laugh at things that make me want to cry—it’s the way with a man. He was so simple, so grand. He was like a Greek god, very calm, but not a bit indifferent. He regarded it so broadly—talked of Nature. He is all Nature. He is a great, simple, clean-living ox—slow, reflective, not a bit stupid. He seemed to be above or past all the small teasing, tearing strings which drag mean hearts like yours and mine. I’ve been talking a great deal of nonsense and you are annoyed.”
She looked quite frightened as Edred got up abruptly and rang the bell. The past ten minutes had been so sweet that she would have accepted them willingly as eternity.
“Not a bit.” He shrugged. “But it’s rather rough to compare him to one of his own oxen. Do you remember how proud he was of his stock—murderous black beasts with tremendous horns? I tell you I didn’t half like crossing some of those fields in the twilight.”
The page came in. He looked at her boldly as she sat on the couch. She decided that her first step of authority should be the dismissal of that boy. Edred ordered tea. Everything was dainty, strangely dainty to her, because she was fresh from the coarse, lavish hospitality of Sussex. The sandwiches were evanescent—a suggestion of yellow and green. Edred tilted the cream into her cup; at Folly Corner they often had to put up with skim milk because Jethro insisted on having so many pounds of butter made weekly. He had his stern economies; believed in making farming thoroughly pay. When eggs fetched more than a shilling a dozen almost every one was sent to market.
There were French cakes, toast cut in mathematically exact triangles. The aroma of the tea seemed to fill the room. They sat by the open window, an inlaid table spread with exquisitely drawn linen between them. She looked at the road, across the railings into the park, where an occasional carriage drove through the haze. She looked at Edred. The prison stain was completely gone. His diamond ring, the pin at his neck, all his indications of prosperity, pleased her. And yet she thought the diamonds ostentatious. If he had been a portly man, instead of a slim and elegant one, he would have been vulgar.
She was always touched by externals—had a painful respect for the things money gave. In the midst of her intense happiness she paused to consider discreetly that, love apart, Edred was a more eligible husband than Jethro. She thought of Jethro—that side of him which had always jarred on her: his half-sheepish, half-surly air in the presence of strangers, his shy avoidance of women. Then she thought of his toilet—the striped tags of his thick boots, which were generally hanging out, the black suit, which he would speak of as his “best”; his week-day shirts of galatea; his best white ones, which he did not often wear because of the difficulty experienced by the old washerwoman in getting them up. She thought of his ridiculous neckties, of his huge, snuffy silk pocket-handkerchief, of the turnip-like repeater which had been his grandfather’s, and which he lugged out of his capacious pocket laboriously. She poured herself more tea from the Queen Anne silver pot. She poured another cup for Edred, feeling a delightful sense of being wifely as she did it.
“We might have had some of Jeth’s jam,” he said, idly smiling at her. His eyes seemed to contract and glitter unnaturally with undisguised admiration. She was very flushed and triumphant, a little feverish and reckless with her mastery of him. Yet, all the same, because she was a woman of the world, and had been driven to consider her reputation, she began to wonder, as the gray haze in the park grew black, what suggestion he was going to make for the night. One could not walk out into the street, take a hansom, and drive to be married forthwith. He said, pushing his empty cup away and settling back in the chair:
“I’ve been lucky. Everything I’ve touched has turned up trumps.”
“The ruby mine——”
“Pooh! That is only one thing. I’ve learnt, by very bitter experience, that it is as well to have plenty of irons in the fire.”