“Claudia, dear, I am very happy here with you, but one can’t control one’s thoughts or shut watertight doors on one’s affairs. A woman’s life is different. Men cannot help mingling their business with their pleasure.”
“You mean we have nothing else to think of but you?” She threw up her head at an angle which was particularly becoming, and showed the softness and whiteness of her throat in the collarless dress.
“No,” he said, “but you haven’t any big objective in life. My dear Claudia, if you understood the keen competition nowadays, you wouldn’t mind a man’s thoughts straying back to the fray. You don’t really, you are much too clever to want a stupid, love-sick swain who can talk or think of nothing else but love. You have said many times that you are in complete sympathy with my ambitions. Don’t be feminine and illogical. I was flattering myself”—he put his hand on hers with his most engaging smile—“that I had won a super-feminine and logical wife.”
“I am in sympathy with you Gilbert.” She carefully kept her eyes from his face, as though that would break the chain of her thoughts. “And I don’t want you to be a stupid, love-sick swain, but——” How could she make him understand without seeming petty and unreasonable? “Gilbert,” she went on quickly, determined to say frankly what she was thinking, “is everything in your life subservient to your work? Sometimes you talk as if everything else—as though we were the rungs upon which you mounted the ladder. When you talk of wasting time—things being trivial and not worth while—your face becomes so contemptuous and hard and engrossed it makes me frightened. I want you to have a career; I wouldn’t have married an idle man. I will help you in every way I can; I shan’t expect impossible attention—but, Gilbert, I want our marriage to mean something to you, a big something.”
She paused for breath, and he opened his lips to speak, but she signed to him to be silent.
“Let me finish. I couldn’t bear to think that your work was everything to you, and that I—I was merely the Hausfrau that bore your name and sat at your table. It might be enough for some women, but it wouldn’t be enough for me. I warn you that if you ever let me drop into the background of life I—I don’t know what I might not do. I told you just now that I wasn’t conventional. Love is the only convention that I own. Gilbert, tell me something quite truthfully. If I am asking things you can’t give me, let us break off the engagement before it is too late. I want”—her voice broke a little and her eyes were dimmed with feeling—“I want a great deal of love. I’ve never had it, you know, and I—I’m so hungry. If I didn’t love you, I shouldn’t be talking like this. You know I love you; but you—you—Gilbert——”
She had risen from her seat and faced him. She was very much in earnest, and her mouth trembled like a child’s. Her full, rounded bosoms under the linen and lace heaved with her quick heart-beats; her eyes asked piteously for love.
She was very beautiful in that moment. She was young and fresh and fragrant, with not a touch of artifice about her. There was no man alive that would not have been touched by her beautiful, pleading eyes. She promised so much. The hint of passion in her eyes and colouring would have allured any man, and Gilbert was by nature a passionate animal. Passion and ambition had warred from his youth, and he had deliberately crushed out his warm human instincts. Until he met Claudia they had been absolutely under control. Now, as on the night he had proposed to her, something swept over him like a huge wave and swamped his brain. He only knew that he desired this girl and that he had never been thwarted in anything he had set his heart upon. He did love her; what more could she want? She was young and immature; she did not understand that man’s feelings may be the deeper for not finding constant expression. Later, when they were married, she would understand better.
He forgot they were in the garden of Holme Court—in his cooler moments he was desperately afraid of any demonstrations of affection—and he sprang to his feet and caught her in his strong arms. He showered kisses on her passionate, trembling lips, kisses that sent a wild thrill of fearful joy through her, that made the placid, sunny garden rock and reel before her eyes, and gave her a vivid glimpse of what marriage might mean. And no man had ever roused her passions before. This man had always had the power to do so since the dinner-party when he had held her hand in his and asked if he might claim the privileges of old friendship and call her Claudia. Something had stirred uneasily then.
“If—if he has this power over me, if he can rouse the woman in me,” she reasoned, “he must be the right man, the man I should marry.” It was the simple, true mating of Nature. Surely, surely all would be well?