One night Marjorie had been sitting musing before the stove for a long
time, and suddenly she said: "I wonder if we shall fail. I wonder if we
shall get into a mess again when we are back in London.... As big a mess
and as utter a discontent as sent us here...."
Trafford was scraping out his pipe, and did not answer for some moments.
Then he remarked: "What nonsense!"
"But we shall," she said. "Everybody fails. To some extent, we are bound
to fail. Because indeed nothing is clear; nothing is a clear issue....
You know--I'm just the old Marjorie really in spite of all these
resolutions--the spendthrift, the restless, the eager. I'm a born
snatcher and shopper. We're just the same people really."
"No," he said, after thought. "You're all Labrador older."
"I always _have_ failed," she considered, "when it came to any special
temptations, Rag. I can't _stand_ not having a thing!"
He made no answer.
"And you're still the same old Rag, you know," she went on. "Who weakens
into kindness if I cry. Who likes me well-dressed. Who couldn't endure
to see me poor."
"Not a bit of it. No! I'm a very different Rag with a very different
Marjorie. Yes indeed! Things--are graver. Why!--I'm lame for life--and
I've a scar. The very _look_ of things is changed...." He stared at her
face and said: "You've hidden the looking-glass and you think I haven't
noted it----"
"It keeps on healing," she interrupted. "And if it comes to
that--where's my complexion?" She laughed. "These are just the
superficial aspects of the case."
"Nothing ever heals completely," he said, answering her first sentence,
"and nothing ever goes back to the exact place it held before. We _are_
different, you sun-bitten, frost-bitten wife of mine."...
"Character is character," said Marjorie, coming back to her point.
"Don't exaggerate conversion, dear. It's not a bit of good pretending we
shan't fall away, both of us. Each in our own manner. We shall. We
shall, old man. London is still a tempting and confusing place, and you
can't alter people fundamentally, not even by half-freezing and
half-starving them. You only alter people fundamentally by killing them
and replacing them. I shall be extravagant again and forget again, try
as I may, and you will work again and fall away again and forgive me
again. You know----It's just as though we were each of us not one
person, but a lot of persons, who sometimes meet and shout all together,
and then disperse and forget and plot against each other...."
"Oh, things will happen again," said Trafford, in her pause. "But they
will happen again with a difference--after this. With a difference.
That's the good of it all.... We've found something here--that makes
everything different.... We've found each other, too, dear wife."
She thought intently.
"I am afraid," she whispered.
"But what is there to be afraid of?"
"_Myself_."
She spoke after a little pause that seemed to hesitate. "At times I
wish--oh, passionately!--that I could pray."
"Why don't you?"
"I don't believe enough--in that. I wish I did."
Trafford thought. "People are always so exacting about prayer," he said.
"Exacting."
"You want to pray--and you can't make terms for a thing you want. I used
to think I could. I wanted God to come and demonstrate a bit.... It's no
good, Madge.... If God chooses to be silent--you must pray to the
silence. If he chooses to live in darkness, you must pray to the
night...."
"Yes," said Marjorie, "I suppose one must."
She thought. "I suppose in the end one does," she said....