To which she replies: "'I'm not one of your Gentile rawnees who loves and kisses all day and half the night.... I love when I feels like it, and I bet I give you more to remember than any silly fat girl in these parts....'"
He has to take her on her own terms ... but she loves his bulk and beauty, and on this occasion she yields and her hardness melts into his passion "as a rock melts into a wave."
But she goes away, and betrays him by marrying one of her own kind and so drives Robert almost out of his mind.
As a reaction he turns to Mabel, an anæmic, town-bred, artificial type of girl who imparted to his "flagging taste a savour as of salt and olives."
"She brought the atmosphere of streets and shops and picture-houses into the stuffy little parlour of a country cottage.... After his country loves, it excited him to touch the novelty of a powdered skin—Mabel's powder and scent were part of a new and very gripping charm...."
"It was June when Hannah came back. The hay had been cut in the low fields by the river, but the high grounds were still russet with sorrel and plantain, and sainfoin waiting for the scythe. The lanes were dim with the warm dust that hung over them and mixed with the cloud of chervil and cow-parsley and fennel that filmed the hedges, making with it a sweet, stale scent of dust and flowers. Down by the watercourses the hawthorn had faded, and the meadowsweet sicklied the still air that thickened above the dykes and at night crept up as a damp, perfumed mist to farmhouse walls."
Suddenly Robert makes up his mind. To forget Hannah he decides to marry Mabel, and does so. "She was a lovely little girl, with her soft, powdered skin and her fluffy hair and her dainty ways." But she does not take kindly to her new life.
"Lying there in bed, in her flimsy, town-made night-gown, staring at the black, star-dazzled sky, listening to the sough of the reeds and the moan of the water ... she would feel strangely and terrifyingly lonely ... the common, homely fields seemed to take on a savage remoteness ... even the man at her side, so familiar and commonplace to her now, by day her playfellow and companion and master, now seemed to take his part in the strangeness of it all ... he belonged to this dark, unfriendly country, he was part of its clay; it had worked itself into him, his very skin smelt of its soil."
She gets jealous lest he should still hanker after his early love, and she taunts him with it. A frequent drinker, one night he returns drunk and has an accident: he is rescued by a frenzied zealot, who frightens him by depicting the terrors of hell and tries to save his soul, with the result that when he is well again he tramps round the country-side trying to convert all those who are not yet "saved." Mabel somewhat naturally looks on his phase as evidence of lunacy. He gives up smoking and drinking and looks on himself as one of God's chosen.