第34章

"Good night," he answered, and held her fast; and they gave each other a long kiss of promise and communion.

The memory of it glowed in him still as he sat over his crumbling fire; but beneath his physical exultation he felt a certain gravity of mood.His happiness was in some sort the rallying-point of many scattered purposes.He summed it up vaguely by saying to himself that to be loved by a woman like that made "all the difference"...He was a little tired of experimenting on life; he wanted to "take a line", to follow things up, to centralize and concentrate, and produce results.Two or three more years of diplomacy--with her beside him!--and then their real life would begin: study, travel and book-making for him, and for her--well, the joy, at any rate, of getting out of an atmosphere of bric-a-brac and card-leaving into the open air of competing activities.

The desire for change had for some time been latent in him, and his meeting with Mrs.Leath the previous spring had given it a definite direction.With such a comrade to focus and stimulate his energies he felt modestly but agreeably sure of "doing something".And under this assurance was the lurking sense that he was somehow worthy of his opportunity.

His life, on the whole, had been a creditable affair.Out of modest chances and middling talents he had built himself a fairly marked personality, known some exceptional people, done a number of interesting and a few rather difficult things, and found himself, at thirty-seven, possessed of an intellectual ambition sufficient to occupy the passage to a robust and energetic old age.As for the private and personal side of his life, it had come up to the current standards, and if it had dropped, now and then, below a more ideal measure, even these declines had been brief, parenthetic, incidental.In the recognized essentials he had always remained strictly within the limit of his scruples.

From this reassuring survey of his case he came back to the contemplation of its crowning felicity.His mind turned again to his first meeting with Anna Summers and took up one by one the threads of their faintly sketched romance.He dwelt with pardonable pride on the fact that fate had so early marked him for the high privilege of possessing her:

it seemed to mean that they had really, in the truest sense of the ill-used phrase, been made for each other.

Deeper still than all these satisfactions was the mere elemental sense of well-being in her presence.That, after all, was what proved her to be the woman for him: the pleasure he took in the set of her head, the way her hair grew on her forehead and at the nape, her steady gaze when he spoke, the grave freedom of her gait and gestures.He recalled every detail of her face, the fine veinings of the temples, the bluish-brown shadows in her upper lids, and the way the reflections of two stars seemed to form and break up in her eyes when he held her close to him...

If he had had any doubt as to the nature of her feeling for him those dissolving stars would have allayed it.She was reserved, she was shy even, was what the shallow and effusive would call "cold".She was like a picture so hung that it can be seen only at a certain angle: an angle known to no one but its possessor.The thought flattered his sense of possessorship...He felt that the smile on his lips would have been fatuous had it had a witness.He was thinking of her look when she had questioned him about his meeting with Owen at the theatre: less of her words than of her look, and of the effort the question cost her: the reddening of her cheek, the deepening of the strained line between her brows, the way her eyes sought shelter and then turned and drew on him.Pride and passion were in the conflict--magnificent qualities in a wife! The sight almost made up for his momentary embarrassment at the rousing of a memory which had no place in his present picture of himself.

Yes! It was worth a good deal to watch that fight between her instinct and her intelligence, and know one's self the object of the struggle...

Mingled with these sensations were considerations of another order.He reflected with satisfaction that she was the kind of woman with whom one would like to be seen in public.It would be distinctly agreeable to follow her into drawing-rooms, to walk after her down the aisle of a theatre, to get in and out of trains with her, to say "my wife" of her to all sorts of people.He draped these details in the handsome phrase "She's a woman to be proud of", and felt that this fact somehow justified and ennobled his instinctive boyish satisfaction in loving her.

He stood up, rambled across the room and leaned out for a while into the starry night.Then he dropped again into his armchair with a sigh of deep content.

"Oh, hang it," he suddenly exclaimed, "it's the best thing that's ever happened to me, anyhow!"The next day was even better.He felt, and knew she felt, that they had reached a clearer understanding of each other.

It was as if, after a swim through bright opposing waves, with a dazzle of sun in their eyes, they had gained an inlet in the shades of a cliff, where they could float on the still surface and gaze far down into the depths.

Now and then, as they walked and talked, he felt a thrill of youthful wonder at the coincidence of their views and their experiences, at the way their minds leapt to the same point in the same instant.

"The old delusion, I suppose," he smiled to himself."Will Nature never tire of the trick?"But he knew it was more than that.There were moments in their talk when he felt, distinctly and unmistakably, the solid ground of friendship underneath the whirling dance of his sensations."How I should like her if I didn't love her!" he summed it up, wondering at the miracle of such a union.