“You’re just a child,” said Calthorpe. “You want to play. Poor little soul!”
“Oh, how kind you are,” she said, and he felt her fingers flutter within his hand. “I get so tired of fighting, sometimes....”
“Won’t you tell me just exactly what you’re fighting against?” He was very patient and full of pity, but believing her to be slightly hysterical he had the reasonable man’s reliance on a calm statement of her difficulties to disperse much of their bogie-mist.
She only said, however, “I don’t know.”
(“Hysteria,” he thought. If she had said, “Forces of darkness,” he would have started mistrustfully, without allowing himself to be impressed. But she was too ignorant to use the phrase.)
“Come, then,” he said heartily, “it can’t be a very serious enemy if you can’t give it a name,—what?”
“It’s everything,” she said, “the floods,—I hate them,—the factory.... If the factory would stop, sometimes, but it never does: always that black smoke, and the men working in shifts to keep it going, and then the men always talking about wages, and sometimes the strikes. Even the abbey gets to be like the factory.”
“You’re fanciful,” said Calthorpe.
“Anybody would get fanciful, living with Silas and Gregory,” she replied mournfully.
How she changed! he reflected. Sometimes she ordered him about, and sometimes she came to him like a child for consolation. Whatever her mood, he never ventured upon familiarity. He told himself sometimes with irritation that he had never been kept so at arm’s length by an otherwise friendly woman. He was a wholesome and masculine man, and he had a wholesome and masculine liking for the company of woman in his hours of relaxation, and in regard to Nan had certainly intended their friendship to run upon different lines, harmless enough, but perhaps a little more stimulating; he found, however, that quite quietly it was she who decided the direction, while he in aggrieved but unprotesting surprise fell meekly in with her wishes. He often told himself that he was wasting his time, and would go no more to the Denes’ cottage, but he always broke his resolution.