She sighed again as she lay sleepless, reckoning relentlessly what her bond to Archie would cost her. That loyalty was costing her youth, beauty, health; it exacted all, and gave nothing. She pictured herself in five years' time. Still young, as lives go, but her looks perished, her skin dried with the glare and sagging with the heat, her mind ruralised, her interests dwindled.
If she had still loved Archie, she would have thrown all this at his feet, as carelessly as she had risked her life for him. But her passion had vanished, had followed her illusion, in an almost unnoticed, almost painless decease, killed by some inward unsoundness, some hidden cancer or malnutrition. And to-day Archie had proved his entire dissociation from her.
The same morning, as if sent by the Devil, had appeared an Adonis, whose words, whose eyes proclaimed an interest, a devotion that was ready to flame into...
But her word bound her to Archie, and by her word she abode. With more reason than many of her generation, Norah had no clear religious or moral principles. Her mother had died when she was born, and her father knew his way about Ruff's Guide better than the Bible. But loyalty was a class virtue that she had not escaped, and for the first of many sleepless nights during the two unhappy years, she began to probe its foundations. No doubt the shade of Dick, cool, handsome, debonair, encouraged her.
To what Moloch had Archie offered her loyalty?
To this fetish of a farm which swallowed all his money, thoughts, energy. On the same altar were laid her heritage by sex and class of careless, elegant living; her place in the life of the day; all that her youth demanded.
And now Archie had proved that he despised her sacrifice. He did not even refuse her claims so long choked back, combat her protest voiced at last. It was sufficient to ignore them."
"I can't help feeling," said Ross, "that Archie's idiotic taciturnity almost earned him Norah's defection.
Had he been able to overcome his distaste for expression—emotion he called it; had he tried to conquer his passion for finishing a job before he mentioned it; had he, in short, told Norah that he was going to Elizabethville to sell his herd in order to satisfy her wishes and take her back to England, Dick Ward would never have secured foothold in her heart.
Instead, Archie held his tongue and left the field to the Devil and to Dick."