Labrador (N.L.) -- Fiction; London (England) -- Fiction; Love stories, English
If such thoughts came in Lee's villa, they returned with redoubled force
when Trafford found himself packed painfully with Marjorie in the night
train to Paris. His head ached with the rattle and suffocation of the
train, and he knew hers must ache more. The windows of the compartment
and the door were all closed, the litigious little commercial traveller
in shiny grey had insisted upon that, there was no corner seat either
for Marjorie or himself, the dim big package over her head swayed
threateningly. The green shade over the light kept opening with the
vibration of the train, the pallid old gentleman with the beard had
twisted himself into a ghastly resemblance to a broken-necked corpse,
and pressed his knees hard and stiffly against Trafford, and the small,
sniffing, bow-legged little boy beside the rusty widow woman in the
corner smelt mysteriously and penetratingly of Roquefort cheese. For the
seventeenth time the little commercial traveller jumped up with an
unbecoming expletive, and pulled the shade over the light, and the
silent young man in the fourth corner stirred and readjusted his legs.
For a time until the crack of light overhead had widened again every one
became a dark head-dangling outline....
He watched the dim shape before him and noted the weary droop of her
pose. He wished he had brought water. He was intolerably thirsty, and
his thirst gave him the measure of hers. This jolting foetid
compartment was a horrible place for her, an intolerably horrible place.
And she was standing it, for all her manifest suffering, with infinite
gallantry and patience. What a gallant soul indeed she was! Whatever
else she did she never failed to rise to a challenge. Her very
extravagance that had tried their lives so sorely was perhaps just one
aspect of that same quality. It is so easy to be saving if one is timid;
so hard if one is unaccustomed to fear. How beautiful she had shone at
times in the lights and glitter of that house behind there, and now she
was back in her weather-stained tweeds again, like a shining sword
thrust back into a rusty old sheath.
Was it fair that she should come back into the sheath because of this
passion of his for a vast inexhaustible research?
He had never asked himself before if it was fair to assume she would
follow his purpose and his fortunes. He had taken that for granted. And
she too had taken that for granted, which was so generously splendid of
her. All her disloyalties had been unintentional, indeed almost
instinctive, breaches of her subordination to this aim which was his
alone. These breaches he realized had been the reality of her nature
fighting against her profoundest resolutions.
He wondered what Lee must think of this sort of married life. How ugly
and selfish it must seem from that point of view.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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