They had remained longer at dinner than usual, and when Lee went out to
the verandah, she found Mr. and Mrs. Brannan and Mr. Trennahan, a New
Yorker who had recently married and settled in Menlo. Cecil was at her
elbow in a moment.
“Let us take a walk,” he said. “Will it be rude to leave these people?”
“Oh, no; we are very informal among ourselves, and they are Mrs.
Montgomery’s friends rather than mine.”
They crossed the grounds, entered Fair Oaks Lane, and walked toward the
hills. It was moonlight, and the redwoods on the crest of the mountain
were sharp against the sky.
“Can I smoke a cigar?”
“Of course.”
“Should not you have something else round you?”
“This shawl is camel’s hair and very warm. How do you like Randolph?”
“A very decent chap. Is he in love with you?”
“Why is it that when a man admires a woman he fancies every other man
is in love with her?”
“That’s not answering my question. Not that it is necessary. No man
could grow up with you and not love you.”
“You are learning to pay compliments. You will be sending me candy and
flowers next.”
“I’ll never send you candy, nor anything that’s not good for you.”
“Have you spent the last three days regretting that you proposed on
Monday?”
“What an ass you must think me. I proposed, and that was the end of it;
my only regret was that I did it so badly. I have spent the last three
days racking my brains over a different matter, not a wholly foreign
one.”
Lee made no reply. Her hand hung at her side. He took it in a quiet
but determined pressure. “How am I to make you love me?” he asked. “I
haven’t the vaguest idea how to go about it.”
“In the very bottom of your mind wouldn’t you really rather that you
could not? I, too, have been thinking hard during the last three days.
Of course, I know of international marriages that have turned out
very well; but that doesn’t alter the fact that many have turned out
badly--although, for that matter, the United States fairly reeks with
divorce. It is a question to puzzle wiser heads than mine. Are most
English marriages happy?”
“Probably not; but the point is that if you marry your own sort, you
know where you are. If I had ever met an English girl who attracted
me one half as much as you do, and had married her, we should have
followed along certain traditional lines and got on fairly well, even
if there were no great happiness. You see an Englishman is certain of
several things if he marries a perfectly normal Englishwoman of his
own class. She will obey him, she will have as many children as he
wishes, her scheme of life will be his, and, no matter how bright she
may be, she will adapt herself to him--which is not the least important
point. An Englishman simply cannot adapt himself to anybody. It isn’t
in him. He can be a good husband on his own lines, particularly if he
loves his wife; and if he loves her enough, and she makes herself more
charming than other women, he’ll be faithful to her, and do what he can
to make her happy. But she must adapt herself to him.”
“You have the virtue of frankness! Are you trying to frighten me off?”
“It would not be fair of me to deceive you.” He certainly looked very
serious. Lee studied his profile meditatively, but she did not withdraw
her hand. “I don’t see why it should frighten you. We have always been
most sympathetic. We really loved each other when we were little chaps,
and were drawn together at once. In all these years I have had no such
confidante, no one who has been so necessary to me. And you have not
been indifferent; never was there so faithful a correspondent. If you
loved me enough, we should be very happy. Theories go to the winds when
a man wants a woman as much as I want you, and love would settle all
our differences.”
“I wonder!” They walked on in silence for a moment; then she said: “How
brave you are! Much braver than I should be if I consented to marry
you; for I, at least, know you fairly well, whereas you are merely
generalising, and do not know me in the least. I might give you an
exhaustive description of the conditions in which I had been brought
up, from that in which my mother played no small part to the men that
have been my slaves ever since I put on long frocks. I might analyse
to you the growth of my individuality, describing the influence which
the management of my own affairs has had on my character, the fact that
I have done my own thinking all my life, and then--these three years
in which I have been a real belle, and seen more than one man make an
idiot of himself. I might tell you all that, and even enter into a
wise dissertation on the racial differences of our two civilisations;
but nothing could give you a real idea of myself, the idea you would
have absorbed if you had been a part of my environment for the last
ten years. Nothing could be wiser than your observation that we should
marry our own sort. As far as I can figure it out, it comes to this:
If I married Randolph he would spend his life buttoning my boots. If I
married you, I should spend my life pulling off yours----”
“Good heavens, no! What a little beast I was!”
He laughed heartily, although, oddly enough, his laughter did not
interfere with his seriousness in the least. It would have dissipated
that of any other man she knew; but he went on at once. “I should not
quarrel with Fate for giving me a wife who interested me more than any
woman of my own sort could do, if you were always perfectly open and
frank with me. I should hate being intrigued, and I should never have
the patience nor the inclination to sit down and unravel any woman’s
complexities. If you did not go to work deliberately to puzzle me, I
should soon know you, and I cannot imagine you other than absolutely
charming.”
“If I pluck out my complexities--in other words, my individuality--by
the roots, and adapt myself to you.”
“You could adapt yourself to me without sacrificing the least of your
individuality. I wouldn’t have you other than you are. Where would your
charm be?”
“You began very practically, but you are getting rather Utopian.”
“No, because we are both young. It is true that I am twenty-five,
and that my character is quite formed--a difficult thing for a woman
used to American men to understand. But I still have all the fresh
enthusiasm of youth for anything that interests me, and an immense
capacity for affection, which has been satisfied very little. If you
loved me well enough--that would be the whole point.”
“In other words, the entire responsibility of this matrimonial
experiment would lie on my shoulders.”
“Don’t call it an experiment, for God’s sake! It is life and death for
me. If I take you I take you forever, and if you decide to marry me,
you must make up your mind that we _will_ be happy.”
They walked on for another moment in silence. He felt her fingers curl
up stiffly, but she said quite calmly:
“I decided long ago, when I was sixteen, I think, to marry you, and
I have never changed my mind for a moment. I always knew that you
would come. On Monday, I could not make up my mind to fall into your
arms like a ripe apple; but you are so serious that you have made me
serious, and I cannot coquet any longer.”
Cecil had dropped her hand and stopped short, facing her.
“Is it possible that you love me?” he asked. “Is it possible?”
“I have loved you twenty times more than any one on earth for years and
years, and I shall love no one else as long as I live.... Cecil, you
_do_ stare so!”
But in another second he had ceased to stare.