"That makes it rather difficult, of course," she said at length.
And then it seemed easiest for him to shake hands and walk away without adding anything.
His family by itself on one side, Agnes by herself on the other would not have spurred Eric to action. He was precipitated by the felicitations of an almost complete stranger in the train on Monday morning and held to his course by a succession of congratulatory notes and telephone messages.
"I don't know," he wrote to Barbara on reaching home, "whether you have seen this week's 'World and His Wife.' There's a rather broad hint at our engagement, and I'm receiving congratulations. Isn't this a golden opportunity for publishing the news?"
Barbara's reply was tuned to an uncompromising note which Eric had met but once before—at the beginning of his last illness, when he had threatened to go away from her and the threat had misfired; when, too, he—"one of our conquerors"—had broken down and cringed to her; and she, with drawn cheeks and leaden eyes, had laid his head on her bosom and caressed him, not as a conqueror or a lover, but as a tired, sick child.
"I am so very miserable," she wrote. "Sometimes I could almost wish to die—just to get us all out of this terrible tangle. You'd be happier—after a time, when you'd got over the first feeling of loss and loneliness; and, however lonely and unhappy you'd be without me, it would be nothing to the misery I should bring you, if we were foolish enough to marry. Let me be your devoted, your very loving, very grateful friend! If you try to marry me, you'll be marrying my name, my voice, my clothes, my body; you won't be marrying me; you'll waste your divine love on a woman whose soul is at the other end of the world. Whatever happens, I must do you a hideous wrong."
Eric read the letter three times and left it unanswered.
A very little more of this erotic battledore-and-shuttlecock would send them both out of their minds. It was a mistake to write, when both needed a holiday. He telephoned to his agent and walked to Covent Garden for a consultation about the lecturing-tour in America.
"I'm worn out, I must have a complete change," said Eric. "And I want to start at once."
Grierson was surprised out of his habitual placidity by the nervous vehemence of Eric's manner.