Chapter III.
Colour-blind from his tenth year, Chamois Hyde (late of Christ's, Oxford, not to be confused with Christchurch, Cambridge), had hitherto ignored details of scenery; but now the vermiliony petal of the pimpernel, the rubicund radix of the carrot, the blue of the insensate bottle-fly—these reminded him respectively of the cheeks of Margerine, her hair, the spots in her grey eyes where, as we said, the soul looked through. The harvest-sheaves again were, broadly speaking, her figure.
Till now he had been impervious to the new femalehood, rising like Proteus from the azure foam; dumbly he had waited for a woman with possible potentialities, or, failing this, with potential possibilities.
Margerine, whom we left a fortnight ago inarticulately gurgling by the trout-stream, caught the note of a step in the briar-patch. With her budding instinct she could tell her lover's footfall half a mile away, waking the age-echo in her chest. This one was lighter and less gregarious. In her sphinxy way she divined that it belonged to a woman with Puritan impossibilities and a yellow plaster next her heart.
Under a mask of habitual and hereditary reticence, the step came on, revealing a finished creature, gowned beyond all mending. Margerine, whose face was her ewe-lamb, became sub-acutely aware of her own half-made frock, and yearned a little in the other's direction.
"Oh!" she said; "how did you get it built that way? I mean the gown." The woman's voice came through the envelope of Margerine's sub-consciousness, steely clear as a cheese-cutter. "My name is Mrs. Chamois Hyde. In other words, I am the wife of Mr. Chamois Hyde!"
"The wife of Chamois Hyde?" said the innocent girl; "I do not follow you."
"Let me explain," said the other, unsparingly. "Chamois Hyde, who is now due at your trout-stream" (Margarine smiled stoopingly), "is my husband. I say, he married me. Once I had a maiden name. That is all past. I changed it when I married. All honourable women do. I am honourable. I changed mine. Now I am Mrs. Chamois Hyde. See?"
"Can't help that," said Margerine cheerfully; "he loves me." This was the folded-lamb's point of view.