She and Marie Louise went about in breeches and shirts and worked like hostlers around the stables and in the 29 paddocks, breaking colts and mucking out stalls. They donned the blouses and boots of peasants, and worked in the fields with rake and hoe and harrow. They even tried the plow, but they followed it too literally, and the scallopy furrows they drew across the fields made the yokels laugh or grieve, according to their natures.
The photographers were alive to the piquancy of these revelations, and portraits of Marie Louise in knickers and puttees, and armed with agricultural weapons, appeared in the pages of all the weeklies along with other aristocrats and commoners. Some of these even reached America.
There was just one flaw for Rosalind in this “As You Like It” life and that was the persistence of the secret association with Nicky. It was the strangest of clandestine affairs.
Marie Louise had always liked to get out alone in a saddle or behind the wheel of a runabout, and Sir Joseph, when he came up from town, fell into the habit of asking her once in a while to take another little note to Nicky.
She found him in out-of-the-way places. He would step from a clump of bushes by the road and hail her car, or she would overtake him and offer him a lift to his inn, or she would take horse and gallop across country and find him awaiting her in some lonely avenue or in the twist of a ravine.
He was usually so preoccupied and furtive that he made no proffer of courtship; but once when he seemed peculiarly triumphant he rode so close to her that their knees girded and their spurs clashed, and he tried to clip her in his arms. She gathered her horse and let him go, and he plunged ahead so abruptly that the clinging Nicky dragged Marie Louise from her saddle backward. He tried to swing her to the pommel of his own, but she fought herself free and came to the ground and was almost trampled. She was so rumpled and so furious, and he so frightened, that he left her and spurred after her horse, brought him back, and bothered her no more that day.
“If you ever annoy me again,” she said, “it’ll be the last you’ll see of me.”
She was too useful to be treated as a mere beauty, and she had him cowed.
It was inevitable that Marie Louise, being silently urged 30 to love Nicky, should helplessly resist the various appeals in his behalf.
There is no worse enemy to love than recommendation. There is something froward about the passion. It hangs back like a fretful child, loathing what is held out for its temptation, longing for the forbidden, the sharp, the perilous.