They had been to the river to gather flowering rushes, and had been caught in a shower. It was a wet summer, one of those years when you hear the continual soft rushing of rain and when the plants in the garden go to luxuriant leaf. She sat under the tree. She had taken off her hat and was holding it carefully in her lap. She had pulled the skirt of her gown over her bodice and held it, lining outward, round her head and shoulders. Her knees were drawn to her chin, and her chin rested in the scooped hollows of her hands.
“These queer colors that you like run dreadfully,” she complained.
“Why did you wear a new dress on a threatening afternoon?”
“Because it is Bank Holiday. I have an ineradicable Bank Holiday instinct for new clothes and an outing. This dress will be spoiled. I’d like a navy-blue serge coat and skirt—you’d never permit it. Blue serge—especially when it is touched up with cardinal—sounds so safe, so sane; it seems to shout of all the good, thrifty, respectable women who do their duty. Blue serge and a sailor hat!”
James Pray looked down at her tenderly and yet with a masculine intolerance of her nonsense.
How is it that I know so much—the very details of their looks and words? In after days—when Adeline and Murphy were dead—Pray used to talk of her by the hour, and bore me to death.
He looked down at her. His first painful impression was that she had grown very thin; he had not noticed it before. However, this impression passed, and he watched her with the ardent eye of an artist. Her gray eyes stared out troublously, vaguely, from the shelter of the great elm, at the heavy rain falling in the open. He loved her intensely. I expect he loved her more, in his steady, level-headed way, than she loved him. He never talked about it; these women with so many words of love are very often only words.
She must have been very tiresome, judging from what he told me. She was always fondling him; a man gets sick of that. He said that she seemed to have a sort of agonized remorse in her tenderness. I could have explained.
Suddenly the rain stopped, and a bar of yellow broke the slaty sky.
“Come on,” he said; “never mind the rushes.”