The shouts were renewed behind, warning them that they were bearing too far to the left. Improving their course, he continued, “Yes, marriage.” The feeling that they could not be united until she knew all about him made him again endeavour to explain.
“All that’s been bad in me, the things I’ve put up with—the second best—”
She murmured, considered her own life, but could not describe how it looked to her now.
“And the loneliness!” he continued. A vision of walking with her through the streets of London came before his eyes. “We will go for walks together,” he said. The simplicity of the idea relieved them, and for the first time they laughed. They would have liked had they dared to take each other by the hand, but the consciousness of eyes fixed on them from behind had not yet deserted them.
“Books, people, sights—Mrs. Nutt, Greeley, Hutchinson,” Hewet murmured.
With every word the mist which had enveloped them, making them seem unreal to each other, since the previous afternoon melted a little further, and their contact became more and more natural. Up through the sultry southern landscape they saw the world they knew appear clearer and more vividly than it had ever appeared before. As upon that occasion at the hotel when she had sat in the window, the world once more arranged itself beneath her gaze very vividly and in its true proportions. She glanced curiously at Terence from time to time, observing his grey coat and his purple tie; observing the man with whom she was to spend the rest of her life.
After one of these glances she murmured, “Yes, I’m in love. There’s no doubt; I’m in love with you.”
Nevertheless, they remained uncomfortably apart; drawn so close together, as she spoke, that there seemed no division between them, and the next moment separate and far away again. Feeling this painfully, she exclaimed, “It will be a fight.”
But as she looked at him she perceived from the shape of his eyes, the lines about his mouth, and other peculiarities that he pleased her, and she added:
“Where I want to fight, you have compassion. You’re finer than I am; you’re much finer.”