HAD Sheila, then, Lavender could not help asking himself, a bad temper, or any other qualities and characteristics which were apparent to other people, but not to him? Was it possible that, after all, Ingram was right, and that he had yet to learn the nature of the girl he had married? It would be unfair to say that he suspected something wrong about his wife—that he fancied she had managed to conceal something—merely because Mrs. Lavender had said that Sheila had a bad temper; but here was another person who maintained that when the days of his romance were over he would see the girl in another light.
Nay, as he continued to ask himself, had not the change already begun? He grew less and less accustomed to see in Sheila a beautiful wild sea-bird that had fluttered down for a time into a strange home in the South. He had not quite forgotten or abandoned those imaginative scenes in which the wonderful sea-princess was to enter crowded drawing-rooms and have all the world standing back to regard her and admire her and sing her praises. But now he was not so sure that that would be the result of Sheila’s entrance into society. As the date of a certain dinner-party drew near, he began to wish she was more like the women he knew. He did not object to her strange, sweet ways of speech, nor to her odd likes and dislikes, nor even to an unhesitating frankness that nearly approached rudeness sometimes in its scorn of all compromise with the truth; but how would others regard these things? He did not wish to gain the reputation of having married an oddity.
“Sheila,” he said, on the morning of the day on which they were going to this dinner-party, “you should not say like-a-ness. There are only two syllables in likeness. It really does sound absurd to hear you say like-a-ness.”
She looked up to him, with a quick trouble in her eyes. When had he spoken to her so petulantly before? And then she cast down her eyes again, and said, submissively, “I will try not to speak like that. When you go out I take a book and read aloud, and try to speak like you; but I cannot learn all at once.”
“I don’t mind,” he said; “but, you know, other people must think it so odd. I wonder why you should always say gyarden for garden now, when it is just as easy to say garden?”
Once upon a time he had said there was no English like the English spoken in Lewis, and had singled out this very word as typical of one peculiarity in the pronunciation. But she did not remind him of that. She only said, in the same simple fashion, “If you will tell me my faults, I will try to correct them.”
She turned away from him to get an envelope for a letter she had been writing to her father. He fancied something was wrong, and perhaps some touch of compunction smote him, for he went after her and took her hand, and said, “Look here, Sheila. When I point out any trifles like that, you must not call them faults, and fancy that I have any serious complaint to make. It is for your own good that you should meet the people who will be your friends on equal terms, and give them as little as possible to talk about.”
“I should not mind their talking about me,” said Sheila, with her eyes still cast down, “but it is your wife they must not talk about; and if you will tell me anything I do wrong I will correct it.”
“Oh, you must not think it is anything so serious as that. You will soon pick up from the ladies you will meet some notion of how you differ from them; and if you should startle or puzzle them a little at first by talking about the chances of the fishing or the catching of wild duck, or the way to reclaim bog-land, you will soon get over all that.”
Sheila said nothing, but she made a mental memorandum of three things she was not to speak about. She did not know why these subjects should be forbidden, but she was in a strange land and going to see strange people, whose habits were different from hers. Moreover, when her husband had gone she reflected that these people, having no fishing and peat-mosses, and no wild-duck, could not possibly be interested in such affairs; and thus she fancied she perceived the reason why she should avoid all mention of these things.