“I’m glad that’s all settled,” said he. “Now you can take up the threads of life again.”
“What do you think I can make of them?” she asked.
“I can’t sit here idle all my life—not here, at ‘The Towers,’ ” she laughed, “for I’m not going to inflict myself on you for a lifetime—but here, in the world.”
He had no practical suggestion to make; but he spoke from the sincerity of his tradition.
“A woman like you fulfils her destiny by being her best self.”
“But being good is scarcely an occupation.”
He smiled. “I give it up, my dear. If you like, I can teach you geology——”
She laughed. Geology had to do with dead things. She cared not a hang for the past. She wanted to forget it. The epoch of the dynosaurus and the period of the past year were, save for a few hundreds of centuries, contemporaneous. No past, thank you. The present and the future for her. The present was mere lotus-eating; delightful, but demoralising. It was the future that mattered.
“If only you were an astrologer, and could bind me apprentice,” she said. “No,” she added after a pause. “There’s nothing for it. I must do something. I think I’ll go in for Infant Welfare and breed bull-dogs.”
She watched him as he laboriously stuffed his pipe with his one hand by means of a little winch fixed to the refectory table and lit it by a match struck on a heavy mat stand; refraining from helping him, although all the woman in her longed to do so, for she knew his foibles. The very first time he had entered the house, he had refused her offer of help with his Burberry. He needed a woman to look after him; not a sister; not a landlady-lodger friend; a wife, in fact, whose arm and hand he would accept unquestionably, in lieu of his own. A great pity sprung in her heart. Why had no woman claimed him—a man stainless in honour, exquisite in thought, loyal of heart, and—not the least qualification for the perfect gentle knight in a woman’s eyes—soldier-like in bearing? There was something missing. That was all the answer she could give herself. Something intangible. Something magnetic, possessed by the liar and scamp who had been her husband. She could live with Blaise Olifant for a hundred years in perfect amity, in perfect sympathy . . . but with never a thrill.