“Must you really go? Here is Nancy’s latest photograph.” She took it from the table. “Of course you have one. Nancy is just the average woman—insatiable desire to have herself photographed in evening-dress. Nancy is stupid; she actually believed that a Papal Bull was a live animal. Just wit enough to dress her magnificent hair according to the latest fashion plate—that’s Nancy! She’s callous, too. The other day she ran down one of the Peter Buckman children when she was cycling. She only said calmly that it ‘was bad for the wheel.’ Fortunately the child wasn’t hurt.”
Pamela went home in bright moonlight; it was only a stone’s throw from the Buttery to Folly Corner.
She thought calmly of her future as she walked: the moon, the sweet, crisp March night cooled and stilled her. She was not going to marry for love. To marry for love had once been the dear dream of her life. But that was over; the prison had engulfed her poor romance—it had been a mean one at the best. It was all over—the first wild, keen shame and rebellion, the steadfast belief in him, the passionate waiting for the future. It was all over—dead. She was going to marry Jethro; going to take refuge in his kindliness—as if he were a wayside barn on a wet day. She meant to be a good wife, a happy wife. Nothing was more contemptible than a tiresome, melancholy woman with a past.
[CHAPTER VIII.]
SHE was loitering in the drawing-room next morning when Jethro came in. There was a strong touch of out-door sweetness about him. He was not one of those men who smell of hot rooms and tobacco.
He went up and kissed her, taking her fair round face reverently in his hands as a matter of course. She was thrilled, not with love, but with pleasure at the open adoration in his light blue eyes. His great hands placed gently under her chin, his fine head well set on his broad shoulders, and his big limbs in the breeches and gaiters, stirred in her the primitive passion of woman for brute strength in a man.
He threw himself on the couch and blinked lazily at the gewgaws of the room, which his very presence always made so trivial. Then he lugged out his worn brown pocket-book and took from it a slip of paper roughly torn from a newspaper. Directly she saw it Pamela’s cheeks blazed, and the same agonized shame and degradation which she had felt on her first visit to that room she felt then.
“Come here.”
He spoke gently, yet with command; the voice of a man who after marriage will tell his wife to fetch his slippers or his pipe, as if service were a matter of course.