“I don’t understand...” Ivy’s voice was quavering. “I’ve been praying to die, ever since I knew... Why should you...?”
Her voice rose tremulously, broke and died away. Still without looking at her, Eric gripped her wrist.
“But why not?,” he asked.
“I’m nothing to you, and you’re—It isn’t fair on you.”
“I’m the best judge of that,” he answered with exultant, fierce excitement that made his voice harsh. “But you’re not to decide anything for the moment,” he went on more gently. “Just tell me—are you happy?”
He felt his hand brushed by her lips. Then she dragged her wrist from his fingers and bent forward, burying her head in her lap.
They both felt exhausted; and neither knew what to do next. The pitiless publicity of Boulter’s Lock held them in artificial restraint; there were numberless prosaic arrangements to be contrived, but Eric shirked the emotional violence of abruptly broaching them. As she regained composure, Ivy took off her hat and drew herself upright with her hands clasped round her knees, looking away from him to the line of punts under the opposite bank. She had pretty feet and ankles, pretty arms and shoulders, a straight thin back and slender neck; since their first meeting she had lost something of her looks by suddenly becoming so thin, but the sharpness of outline added to her charm of youth and delicacy. Eric suddenly remembered his chill of misgiving as he drove to Eaton Place, expecting to be disappointed in her; a warm wave of compassion blinded him, and he asked himself how a man of Gaymer’s upbringing and traditions could bring himself to commit the social sin for which there was no pardon; if he had waited till Ivy was married, an intrigue would have been venial; if he had chosen a girl from a humbler walk of life, no one would have asked more than that he should behave liberally to her... That was conventional morality in England....
Perhaps the one impossible thing had been made possible by the war. For five years there had been whispered rumours of desolating scandals scotched at the last moment. England was sex-intoxicated; women married light-heartedly on a few weeks’ acquaintance and married again a few months later when their husbands had been killed, without prejudicing their right to acquire three or four lovers in the interval. And those who remained technically virtuous talked sex by day and dreamed it at night; there was nothing they did not know, nothing they would not discuss, and in this welter of short-lived artificial excitement, when all were overworked and overstimulated, when vague cosmic hungers made themselves felt and an opportunity became a duty, it was not surprising that some had lost their heads.
But Ivy looked too fastidious. Her deferential timidity, under the skin-deep manner of bustle and efficiency which had irritated him in New York, was no challenge to a man; her youth imposed an obligation on any one with the wit to see her as an emancipated school-girl; a libertine, when he had pierced the veneer of assurance, would find her insipid; and, even if Gaymer was insensible to discrimination and honourable restraint, Eric could not understand her allowing herself to fall into his hands. Men and women drifted dizzily without seeing where they were going or how far they had gone, but Ivy seemed yet enough of a child to stop herself by sheer ignorant instinct before she began to drift.
“Eric!”