“You had my congratulations a long time ago,” she said, carefully shredding each petal into three.
“Don’t!” he exclaimed impatiently: “I’m serious!”
“Well, then—it is not a fair thing that you are asking me. I don’t know Miss Daye. I never shall know her. To me she is a little marble image with a very pretty polish.”
“And to me also,” he repeated, seizing her words: “she is a little marble image with a very pretty polish.” He put an unconscious demand for commiseration into his tone. Doubtless he did not mean to go so far, but his inflection added, “And I’ve got to marry her!”
“To you—to you!” She plucked aimlessly at her rose, and searched vainly for something which would improve the look of his situation. But the rush of this confidence had torn up commonplaces by the roots. She felt it beating somewhere about her heart; and her concern, for the moment, in hearing of his misfortune, was for herself.
“The ironical part of it is,” he went on, very pale with the effort of his candour, “that I was blindly certain of finding her sympathetic. You know what one means by that in a woman. I wanted it, just then. I seemed to have arrived at a crisis of wanting it. I made ludicrously sure of it. If you had been here,” he added with conviction, “it would never have happened.”
She opened her lips to say “Then I wish I had been here,” but the words he heard were, “People tell me she is very clever.”
“Oh,” he said bitterly, “she has the qualities of her defects, no doubt. But she isn’t a woman—she’s an intelligence. Conceive, I beg of you, the prospect of passing one’s life in conjugal relations with an intelligence!”
Judith assured herself vaguely that this brutality of language had its excuse. She could have told him very fluently that he ought not to marry Rhoda Daye under any circumstances, but something made it impossible that she should say anything of the sort. She strove with the instinct for a moment, and then, as it overthrew her, she looked about her shivering. The evening chill of December had crept in and up from the marshes; one or two street lamps twinkled out in the direction of the city; light white levels of mist had begun to spread themselves among the trees in the garden below them.
“We must go,” she said, rising hurriedly: “how suddenly it has grown cold!” And as she passed before him into the empty house he saw that her face was so drawn that even he could scarcely find it beautiful.