He proclaimed himself a brute for dragging her out on such a filthy morning. It was super-angelic of her to come, but he had scarcely expected her. Wouldn’t it be better to go back home and rest?
“No, no, dear,” she murmured. “This is my rest. Beside you. Storm or sunshine, what does it matter, so long as we’re together?”
“It doesn’t matter to me,” said he, driving off. “Hell and damnation would be Paradise if I always had you with me.”
And in the same emotional key they talked all the time during their drive through a dank and dismal world. They felt like Paolo and Francesca in Watts’s picture, clinging together alone in comfortless space, remote from War Office and wars and other affairs of men. She wailed:
“Oh, darling, if only I had met you before I made my wretched marriage!”
“Yes, by God!” said Godfrey, setting his teeth and feeling very fierce.
It did not occur to either of them, in their unhumorous mood, that when she married he was a gawky boy of sixteen.
Gradually they came to vital things.
“If I were little Mrs. Tomkins, whom nobody knows, we could get a hidden nest somewhere, you and I. It would be happiness, and it would be hurting or betraying nobody. But I’m Lady Edna Donnithorpe, related to half the peerage, and known by sight to everybody who looks at an illustrated paper.”
“Why not cut everything and make a bolt of it?” asked Godfrey, glaring straight in front of him at the cheerless, almost empty road, his young face set very stem.