Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Mothers and daughters -- Fiction; Staffordshire (England) -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
She was silenced. She thought: "If I am thus intimate with him, it must
be because of the talk we had in the garden that night." And it seemed
to her that the scene in the garden had somehow bound them together for
ever in intimacy, that, even if they pretended to be only acquaintances,
they would constantly be breaking through the thin shell of formality
into some unguessed deep of intimacy. She regarded--surreptitiously--his
face, with a keen sense of pleasure. It was romantic, melancholy,
wistful, enigmatic--and, above all, honest. She knew that he had desired
to be an architect, and that his father had thwarted his desire, and
this fact endowed him for her with the charm of a victim. The idea that
all his life had been embittered and shadowed by the caprice of an old
man was beautiful to her in its sadness: she contemplated it with vague
bliss. At their last meeting, during the Sunday School Centenary, he had
annoyed her; he had even drawn her disdain, by his lack of initiative
and male force in the incident of the senile Sunday School teacher. He
had profoundly disappointed her. Now, she simply forgot this; the
sinister impression vanished from her mind. She recalled her first
vision of him in the lighted doorway of his father's shop. Her present
vision confirmed that sympathetic vision. She liked the feel of his
faithful hand, and the glance of his timid and yet bellicose eye. And
she reposed on his very apparent honesty as on a bed. She knew, with the
assurance of perfect faith, that he had nothing dubious to conceal, and
that no test could strain his magnanimity. And, while she so reflected,
she was thinking, too, of Janet's fine dress, and her elegance and
jewels, and wishing that she had changed the old black frock in which
she travelled. The perception that she could never be like Janet cast
her down. But, the next moment, she was saying to herself proudly: "What
does it matter? Why should I be like Janet?" And, the next moment after
that, she was saying, in another phase of her pride: "I _will_ be like
Janet!"
They began to discuss the strike. It was a topic which, during those
weeks, could not be avoided, either by the rich or by the poor.
"I suppose you're like all the rest--against the men?" she challenged
him again, inviting battle.
He replied bluntly: "What earthly right have you to suppose that I'm
like all the rest?"
She bent her head lower, so that she could only see him through the veil
of her eyelashes.
"I'm very sorry," she said, in a low, smiling, meditative voice. "I knew
all the time you weren't."
The thought shot through her mind like a lance: "It is incredible, and
horribly dangerous, that I should be sitting here with him, after all
that has happened to me, and him without the slightest suspicion!... And
yet what can stop it from coming out, sooner or later? Nothing can stop
it."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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