He nodded. "I'll swear you did."
He would have caught at her small ungloved hands, but she put them behind her back and stood looking up at him, like a child saying its lesson.
"My head was full of dreams about love and service. I wanted to be wise and unselfish and to serve God. I gave up the idea of going to college or anywhere to train for working in the world outside, because I thought that Mother needed me."
He nodded, a little puzzled that she should consider this long preamble necessary; but liking her more and more for her solemnity. It seemed to him very sweet that she should tell him all her girlish hopes.
"I threw myself into the life of Marshington, meaning to give to it and to get from it only the best. I wanted to give it all of me, my intelligence, and my love, and my desire to serve. I began to go to parties and picnics and the tennis club. But, do you know, the things here weren't quite what I had expected? People did not seem to want me frightfully; I wasn't pretty—I was rather shy. I didn't understand the teasing and the jokes and the way that the other girls behaved. People began to avoid me. I remember a picnic once, when I walked for all the afternoon with Bobby Mason, because I was so terrified of being left behind"—she swallowed hard, but went on steadily—"without a man to walk with. I had not been at home for more than a year when I found that only one thing mattered here in Marshington for a girl, and that was to get married."
He was frowning a little now. Those things perhaps were true, but somehow he did not like his future wife to say them. She, however, continued to disregard his feelings.
"It took me about six years to discover that I was not the sort of girl whom men wanted to marry. Other girls found partners at dances easily. I sat against the wall, shivering lest every one should see that I was a wallflower, feeling terribly ashamed because to fail in this way was to fail everywhere. I used to think of life as a dance, where the girls had to wait for men to ask them, and if nobody came—they still must wait, smiling and hoping and pretending not to mind. One by one the things that I cared for fell away. Music, mathematics, beautiful things to look at—none of these mattered. They were only quite irrelevant details, because at Marshington there was only one thing that mattered and I had not got it."
He was about to protest, but she silenced him:
"No, no. It's no use saying that it wasn't so. Try to cast your mind back. Can't you remember 'poor Muriel Hammond'—she and Rosie Harpur—the 'heavy' people at the dances whom the nicer men would try to be polite to? Why, you used to be kind to me yourself. You always came and asked me for a waltz when we went to the same dance. I used to stand and watch your programme pencil breathlessly. Would you give me one dance, or two? You never thought that it mattered as much as that, did you, Godfrey?"
He shook his head.