Gerda thought, "I'm happy. Poetry and drawing and Barry. I've everything I want, except a St. Bernard pup, and Kay's giving me that for Christmas. I'm happy."
It was a tingling, intense, sensuous feeling, like stretching warm before a good fire, or lying in fragrant thymy woods in June, in the old Junes when suns were hot. Life was a song and a dream and a summer morning.
"You're happy, Gerda," Neville said to her once, gladly but half wistfully, and she nodded, with her small gleaming smile.
"Go on being happy," Neville told her, and Gerda did not know that she had nearly added "for it's cost rather a lot, your happiness." Gerda seldom cared how much things had cost; she did not waste thought on such matters. She was happy.
CHAPTER XV
THE DREAM
1
Barry and Gerda were married in January in a registry office, and, as all concerned disliked wedding parties, there was no wedding party.
After they had gone, Neville, recovered now from the lilies and languors of illness, plunged into the roses and raptures of social life. One mightn't, she said to herself, be able to accomplish much in this world, or imprint one's personality on one's environment by deeds and achievements, but one could at least enjoy life, be a pleased participator in its spoils and pleasures, an enchanted spectator of its never-ending flux and pageant, its richly glowing moving pictures. One could watch the play out, even if one hadn't much of a part oneself. Music, art, drama, the company of eminent, pleasant and entertaining persons, all the various forms of beauty, the carefully cultivated richness, graces and elegances which go to build up the world of the fortunate, the cultivated, the prosperous and the well-bred—Neville walked among these like the soul in the lordly pleasure house built for her by the poet Tennyson, or like Robert Browning glutting his sense upon the world—"Miser, there waits the gold for thee!"—or Francis Thompson swinging the earth a trinket at his wrist. In truth, she was at times self-consciously afraid that she resembled all these three, whom (in the moods they thus expressed) she disliked beyond reason, finding them morbid and hard to please.