“Poor Hugh,” said Dr. Mount—“he was very like Peter in many ways—Sober and solid and kind-hearted; but he hadn’t Peter’s imagination.”
“Peter’s very sensitive,” said Stella—“in spite of his being such a big, heavy thing.”
Then she smiled, and said in her heart—“Peter’s mine.”
§ 10
Christmas was celebrated at Conster in the manner peculiar to houses where there is no religion and no child. Tradition compelled the various members of the family to give each other presents which they did not want and to eat more food than was good for them; it also compelled them to pack unwillingly into the Wolsey car and drive to Leasan church, where they listened in quite comprehensible boredom to a sermon by brother George. Peter was able to break free from this last superstition, and took himself off to the office at Starvecrow—his family’s vague feeling of unrest at his defection being compensated by the thought that there really wouldn’t have been room for him in the car.
But Starvecrow was dim and sodden on this green Christmas day, full of a muggy cloud drifting up from the Tillingham, and Peter was still sore from the amenities of the Christmas breakfast table—that ghastly effort to be festive because it was Christmas morning, that farce of exchanging presents—all those empty rites of a lost childhood and a lost faith. He hated Christmas.
Also he wanted Stella, and she was not to be had. She too had gone to church—which he would not have minded, if she had not had the alternative of being with him here at Starvecrow. He did not at all object to religion in women as long as they kept it in its proper place. But Stella did not keep hers in its proper place—she let it interfere with her daily life—with his ... and she had not gone to church at Leasan, which was sanctified to Peter by the family patronage and the family vault, but to Vinehall, where they did not even have the decencies of Dearly Beloved Brethren, but embarrassing mysteries which he felt instinctively to be childish and in bad taste.
In Stella’s home this Christmas there would be both religion and children, the latter being represented by her father and herself. Last night when he called at Hollingrove—Dr. Mount’s cottage on the road between Leasan and Vinehall—to ask her to meet him here today at Starvecrow, he had found her decorating a Christmas tree, to be put in the church, of all places. She had asked him to stop and go with her and her father to the Midnight Mass—“Do come, Peter—we’re going to make such a lovely noise at the Gloria in Excelsis. Father Luce has given the boys trays to bang this year.” But Peter had declined, partly because he disapproved of tray-banging as a means of giving glory to God, but mostly because he was hurt that Stella should prefer going to church to being with him at Starvecrow.
She had made a grave mistake, if only she’d known it—leaving him here by himself today, with his time free to think about her, and memories of her dark side still fresh in his mind. For Stella had her dark side, like the moon, though generally you saw as little of it as the moon’s. In nearly all ways she was Peter’s satisfaction. He loved her with body and mind, indeed with a sort of spiritual yearning. He loved her for her beauty, her sense, her warmth, her affectionate disposition which expressed itself naturally in love, her freedom from affectation, and also from any pretensions to wit or cleverness, and other things which he distrusted. But for two things he loved her not—her religion and her attitude towards his family.
Hitherto neither had troubled him much. Their meetings had been so few that they had had but little talk of anything save love. He had merely realised that though she held the country round Vinehall and Leasan as dear as even his idolatry demanded she was very little impressed with the importance of the family to whom that country belonged. But up in London that had scarcely mattered. He had also realised that Stella, as she put it, “tried to be good.” At first he had thought her wanton—her ready reception of his advances, her ardent affection, her unguarded manner, had made him think she was like the many young women filling London in those years, escaped from quiet homes into a new atmosphere of freedom and amorousness, making the most of what might be short-lived opportunities. But he was glad when he discovered his mistake. Peter approved of virtue in women, though he had occasionally taken advantage of its absence. He certainly would never have married a woman who was not virtuous, and he soon discovered that he wanted to marry Stella.