Brent looked surprised, pleasantly disconcerted.
“In what way?”
“Because you are rather unusual. Most men—Oh!—well—you know what I mean.”
It was the beginning of her conscious effort to humour her man. Paul was a sentimentalist, but Manon had a philosophy. She knew that life is always a bit of a scramble and that in Beaucourt life was going to be rather primitive and savage. Paul’s skin was too thin. She had a feeling that she would have to guard his sensitiveness—prevent his impressionable good nature from being at the mercy of hard people. Brent lacked hardness. She had an idea that this lack of hardness had been the cause of his failure.
“But you can’t make a soft man hard,” she said to herself; “it must be done some other way.”
She felt that Brent had that queer passion for ethical self-expression that plain people call “self-sacrifice.” She sensed it vaguely at first, and she could not have translated the impression into words. It was a thread, an intuition, and she followed it.
“This fine weather cannot last,” she said with apparent vagueness.
She filled his cup a second time.
“And to-morrow? What will you do to-morrow?”
He knew at once what he meant to do, and she respected the quiet and orderly way in which he had mapped out the work.