England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
She took up the bottle again, and for a moment considered whether she
should give it back to Herr Van de Greutz--not personally, that would
hardly be safe; but she could post it from England after she left his
service. But she did not do so; Rawson-Clew stood in the way; it was
for him she had taken it, and her purpose in him still stood. He
wanted the explosive, it would be to his credit and honour to have it;
the government service to which he belonged would think highly of him
if he had it--if he received it anonymously, so that he could not tell
from whence it came, and they could not divide the credit of getting
it between him and another. He wanted it, and he had been good to her.
He had been kind when she was in trouble; he had not believed her when
she had called herself dishonest; he had treated her as an equal, in
spite of the affair at Marbridge, and he had asked her to marry him
when he thought she was compromised by the holiday in the Dunes. For a
moment her mind strayed from the point at issue, to that offer of
marriage. She remembered the exact wording of the letter as if she had
but just received it, and it pleased her afresh. She did not regret
that she had refused him; nothing else had been possible. She did not
want to marry him; albeit, when they had sat together under his coat,
she had not shrunk from contact with him as she had shrunk from Joost
when he had tried to take her hand--that was certainly strange. But
she was quite sure she did not want to marry him; now she came to
think about it, she could imagine that, were she a girl of his own
class, with the looks, training and knowledge that belonged, she might
have found him precisely the man she would have wanted to marry.
She went to a drawer and took out an old handkerchief. She was not a
girl of that sort--deep down she felt inarticulately the old primitive
consciousness of inferiority and superiority, at once jealous and
contemptuous; marrying him and living always on his plane were alike
impossible to her, but she could give him the explosive. There was not
one girl among all those others who could have got it and given it to
him!
She tore a piece from the handkerchief, and fastened it over the
stopper of the bottle; then she got out a hat trimmed with bows of
wide ribbon, and sewed the bottle into the centre bow. It presented
rather a bulgy appearance, but by a little pulling of the other
trimming it was hardly noticeable, and really nothing is too peculiar
to be worn on the head. After that she went to bed.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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