“Oh, dear, anything! What l’homme qui vir had—or a frightful scar across my cheek. Could you love me as you do now? I should be the same woman, remember.”
“Then it’d be all the same to me, I s’pose. Let’s turn in.”
He got up, went over to the hearth, on which a small wood fire was burning, straddled his legs, bent his knees and straightened them several times, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his trousers, which were rather tight and horsey and defined his immense limbs. An expression of profound self-satisfaction illumined his face as he looked at his wife, giving it a slightly leery expression, as of a shrewd rustic. His large blunt features seemed to broaden, his big brown eyes twinkled, and his lips, which were thick and very red and had a cleft down their middle, parted under his short bronze moustache, exposing two level rows of square white teeth.
“It’s jolly difficult to imagine you an ugly woman,” he said, with a deep chuckle.
“I do wish you’d keep your legs still,” said Lady Holme. “What earthly pleasure can it give you to go on like that? Would you love me as you do now?”
“You’d be jolly sick if I didn’t, wouldn’t you, Vi, eh?”
“I wonder if it ever occurs to you that you’re hideously conceited, Fritz?”
She spoke with a touch of real anger, real exasperation.
“No more than any other Englishman that’s worth his salt and ever does any good in the world. I ain’t a timid molly-coddle, if that’s what you mean.”
He took one large hand out of his pocket, scratched his cheek and yawned. As he did so he looked as unconcerned, as free from self-consciousness, as much a slave to every impulse born of passing physical sensation as a wild animal in a wood or out on a prairie.