"I'd have been jolly d—decent to her. There aren't many men who'd have been as patient all these last months, though, standing meekly aside while she filled her flat with dirty little Jewish swine and mugs and pacifists. I—good Lord, I wonder how I stood it?" His voice dropped. Its wistfulness wrung Muriel's heart. "She used to be a jolly little kid, though."
He lowered himself into Delia's big arm-chair, and sat smoking fiercely. Without a word Muriel cleared the supper that they both had been unable to eat, and brought in coffee. He took it, thanking her but hardly noticing who she was. She realized that he had to talk things out, to run to somebody with his sad story. For indeed the thing that had happened hurt him deeply. He lied when he said that all he had sought in Clare had been a wife. Muriel knew that he lied, but because it was a lie she could have loved him. For Clare had been far more to him than a woman, beautiful, radiant, of rich vitality. She had been his ideal of all women, the star remote and bright which he could worship, the beauty that lay beyond all lovely things. Thus, though he had not known it, though now, perhaps thought Muriel, he would never know it, he had loved her ever since as a wild, pretty child she had smiled herself straight into his heart. But Godfrey was not the man to cast off everything for an ideal. He stood, and Muriel knew it, rooted and grounded in tradition. "He has roots," she thought and compared him with her father. Where Mr. Hammond was reckless, Godfrey was cautious. Where one was volatile, having no standards but his transient desires, no traditions but those of his creation, the other's life was only the chapter in a story, a long and not ignoble tale of Neales, stretching far back into the dim but dominating past. Mr. Hammond, standing alone, master of his own wealth and his desires, would woo or discard where he would. But Godfrey was far more than just himself. He was an embodiment of a legend, not all of his own making. He belonged to the Weare Grange far more than it belonged to him. So, when the inevitable conflict came between Clare and his home, there had never been cause for half a minute's hesitation. But the knowledge that such a choice had been inevitable, that his dream and the prestige of his position had not sufficed to hold her, had been very bitter. It was this that had robbed him of his air of conquest. His years in Germany had never touched him, for he carried the environment of the Weare Grange with him. That he could never lose. What he had lost was that fine and fugitive ideal, that sense of beauty born from something more universal than his own position, more sacred than the traditions which had formed his conduct. He, the man of property, of dignified assured possession, had been pursued by the passing urgency of that idealism which makes men poets and visionaries. The dream had left him now, and he would never see again the light that once had glorified his youth.
And Muriel, who realized this, for the first time considered him rather than herself. She saw that, with his dream, the legend of his strong, all-conquering charm lay broken. He had lost something that neither she nor anyone else could give him, and she was sorry, sorry, sorry—for him, not for herself.
She let him talk and smoke and fall into long silences, sitting moodily beside her fire. At intervals the cuckoo clock upon the wall called softly, clear small woodland notes. Her knitting needles clicked convulsively. At last he said:
"I suppose that I cared for her really less than I thought."
But this was disloyalty, and Muriel would not have it.
"No, no. You loved her truly. It was she who was not—quite what you thought you loved."
"I've been a damned fool," he muttered.
"You haven't. You must not think like that. Your love was fine, not foolish. You must not get bitter about yourself; don't spoil it. Don't think of her or of yourself as small. Think of her still as noble and beautiful. You were right to love her. You were." Her small voice grew urgent. Her grave, earnest eyes implored him. "Think of her as the loveliest thing that you knew, and of yourself as fine in loving her."
"She was a ripping kid—that time she came to Marshington."