It was presently quite evident to Marjorie that Mr. Magnet intended to
propose marriage to her, and she did not even know whether she wanted
him to do so.
She had met him first the previous summer while she had been staying
with the Petley-Cresthams at High Windower, and it had been evident that
he found her extremely attractive. She had never had a real grown man at
her feet before, and she had found it amazingly entertaining. She had
gone for a walk with him the morning before she came away--a frank and
ingenuous proceeding that made Mrs. Petley-Crestham say the girl knew
what she was about, and she had certainly coquetted with him in an
extraordinary manner at golf-croquet. After that Oxbridge had swallowed
her up, and though he had called once on her mother while Marjorie was
in London during the Christmas vacation, he hadn't seen her again. He
had written--which was exciting--a long friendly humorous letter about
nothing in particular, with an air of its being quite the correct thing
for him to do, and she had answered, and there had been other exchanges.
But all sorts of things had happened in the interval, and Marjorie had
let him get into quite a back place in her thoughts--the fact that he
was a member of her father's club had seemed somehow to remove him from
a great range of possibilities--until a drift in her mother's talk
towards him and a letter from him with an indefinable change in tone
towards intimacy, had restored him to importance. Now here he was in the
foreground of her world again, evidently more ardent than ever, and with
a portentous air of being about to do something decisive at the very
first opportunity. What was he going to do? What had her mother been
hinting at? And what, in fact, did the whole thing amount to?
Marjorie was beginning to realize that this was going to be a very
serious affair indeed for her--and that she was totally unprepared to
meet it.
It had been very amusing, very amusing indeed, at the Petley-Cresthams',
but there were moments now when she felt towards Mr. Magnet exactly as
she would have felt if he had been one of the Oxbridge tradesmen
hovering about her with a "little account," full of apparently
exaggerated items....
Her thoughts and feelings were all in confusion about this business. Her
mind was full of scraps, every sort of idea, every sort of attitude
contributed something to that Twentieth Century jumble. For example, and
so far as its value went among motives, it was by no means a trivial
consideration; she wanted a proposal for its own sake. Daffy had had a
proposal last year, and although it wasn't any sort of eligible
proposal, still there it was, and she had given herself tremendous airs.
But Marjorie would certainly have preferred some lighter kind of
proposal than that which now threatened her. She felt that behind Mr.
Magnet were sanctions; that she wasn't free to deal with this proposal
as she liked. He was at Buryhamstreet almost with the air of being her
parents' guest.
Less clear and more instinctive than her desire for a proposal was her
inclination to see just all that Mr. Magnet was disposed to do, and hear
all that he was disposed to say. She was curious. He didn't behave in
the least as she had expected a lover to behave. But then none of the
boys, the "others" with whom she had at times stretched a hand towards
the hem of emotion, had ever done that. She had an obscure feeling that
perhaps presently Mr. Magnet must light up, be stirred and stirring.
Even now his voice changed very interestingly when he was alone with
her. His breath seemed to go--as though something had pricked his lung.
If it hadn't been for that new, disconcerting realization of an official
pressure behind him, I think she would have been quite ready to
experiment extensively with his emotions....
But she perceived as she lay awake next morning that she wasn't free for
experiments any longer. What she might say or do now would be taken up
very conclusively. And she had no idea what she wanted to say or do.
Marriage regarded in the abstract--that is to say, with Mr. Magnet out
of focus--was by no means an unattractive proposal to her. It was very
much at the back of Marjorie's mind that after Oxbridge, unless she was
prepared to face a very serious row indeed and go to teach in a
school--and she didn't feel any call whatever to teach in a school--she
would probably have to return to Hartstone Square and share Daffy's room
again, and assist in the old collective, wearisome task of propitiating
her father. The freedoms of Oxbridge had enlarged her imagination until
that seemed an almost unendurably irksome prospect. She had tasted life
as it could be in her father's absence, and she was beginning to realize
just what an impossible person he was. Marriage was escape from all
that; it meant not only respectful parents but a house of her very own,
furniture of her choice, great freedom of movement, an authority, an
importance. She had seen what it meant to be a prosperously married
young woman in the person of one or two resplendent old girls revisiting
Bennett College, scattering invitations, offering protections and
opportunities....
Of course there is love.
Marjorie told herself, as she had been trained to tell herself, to be
sensible, but something within her repeated: _there is love_.
Of course she liked Mr. Magnet. She really did like Mr. Magnet very
much. She had had her girlish dreams, had fallen in love with pictures
of men and actors and a music master and a man who used to ride by as
she went to school; but wasn't this desolating desire for
self-abandonment rather silly?--something that one left behind with much
else when it came to putting up one's hair and sensible living,
something to blush secretly about and hide from every eye?
Among other discrepant views that lived together in her mind as cats and
rats and parrots and squirrels and so forth used to live together in
those Happy Family cages unseemly men in less well-regulated days were
wont to steer about our streets, was one instilled by quite a large
proportion of the novels she had read, that a girl was a sort of
self-giving prize for high moral worth. Mr. Magnet she knew was good,
was kind, was brave with that truer courage, moral courage, which goes
with his type of physique; he was modest, unassuming, well off and
famous, and very much in love with her. His True Self, as Mrs. Pope had
pointed out several times, must be really very beautiful, and in some
odd way a line of Shakespeare had washed up in her consciousness as
being somehow effectual on his behalf:
"Love looks not with the eye but with the mind."
She felt she ought to look with the mind. Nice people surely never
looked in any other way. It seemed from this angle almost her duty to
love him....
Perhaps she did love him, and mistook the symptoms. She did her best to
mistake the symptoms. But if she did truly love him, would it seem so
queer and important and antagonistic as it did that his hair was rather
thin upon the crown of his head?
She wished she hadn't looked down on him....
Poor Marjorie! She was doing her best to be sensible, and she felt
herself adrift above a clamorous abyss of feared and forbidden thoughts.
Down there she knew well enough it wasn't thus that love must come. Deep
in her soul, the richest thing in her life indeed and the best thing she
had to give humanity, was a craving for beauty that at times became
almost intolerable, a craving for something other than beauty and yet
inseparably allied with it, a craving for deep excitement, for a sort of
glory in adventure, for passion--for things akin to great music and
heroic poems and bannered traditions of romance. She had hidden away in
her an immense tumultuous appetite for life, an immense tumultuous
capacity for living. To be loved beautifully was surely the crown and
climax of her being.
She did not dare to listen to these deeps, yet these insurgent voices
filled her. Even while she drove her little crocodile of primly sensible
thoughts to their sane appointed conclusion, her blood and nerves and
all her being were protesting that Mr. Magnet would not do, that
whatever other worthiness was in him, regarded as a lover he was
preposterous and flat and foolish and middle-aged, and that it were
better never to have lived than to put the treasure of her life to his
meagre lips and into his hungry, unattractive arms. "The ugliness of
it! The spiritless horror of it!" so dumbly and formlessly the rebel
voices urged.
"One has to be sensible," said Marjorie to herself, suddenly putting
down Shaw's book on Municipal Trading, which she imagined she had been
reading....
(Perhaps all marriage was horrid, and one had to get over it.)
That was rather what her mother had conveyed to her.