"Perhaps I was," she could not help saying.
"Oh, gracious, are you hurt?" His voice was instantly caressing.
"Do I look an object for ambulances?"
He smiled dazzlingly. "You look awfully jolly." Later Eileen
remembered how she had taken this reply for a line of poetry.
A week later the Hon. Reginald Winsor, younger brother of an English
Earl, was teaching Eileen golf.
It had been a week of ecstasy.
She thought of Reginald the last thing at night and the first thing in
the morning and dreamed of him all night.
Now she knew what her life had lacked--to be caught up into another's
personality, to lose one's petty individuality in--in what? Surely not
in a larger; she couldn't be so blind as that. In what then? Ah, yes, in
Nature. He was gloriously elemental. He wasn't himself. He was the
masculine. Yes, that was the correlative element her being needed. The
mere manliness of his pipe made its aroma in his clothes adorable. Or was
it his big simplicity, in which she could bury all her torturing
complexity? Oh, to nestle in it and be at rest. Yet she held him at arm's
length. When they shook hands her nerves thrilled, but she was the colder
outwardly for very fear of herself.
On the ninth day he proposed.
Eileen knew it would be that day. Lying in bed that morning, she found
herself caught by her old impersonal whimsy. "I'm a fever, and on the
ninth day of me the man comes out in a rash proposal." Ah, but this
time she was in a tertian, too. What a difference from those other
proposals--proper or improper. Her mind ran over half a dozen, with a
touch of pity she had not felt at the time. Poor Bob Maper, poor Jolly
Jack Jenkins, if it was like this they felt! But was it her fault? No man
could say she had led him on--except, perhaps, the Hon. Reginald, and
towards him her intentions were honourable, she told herself smiling. But
the jest carried itself farther and more stingingly. Could he make an
"honourable" she told herself her? Ah, God, was she worthy of him, of his
simple manhood? And would he continue proposing, if she told him she was
Nelly O'Neill? And what of his noble relatives? No, no, she must not run
risks. She was only Eileen O'Keeffe, she had never left Ireland save for
the Convent. The rest was a nightmare. How glad she was that nobody knew!
The proposal duly took place in a bunker, while Eileen was whimsically
vituperating her ball. The fascination of her virginal _diablerie_ was
like a force compelling the victim to seize her in his arms after the
fashion of the primitive bridegroom. However the poor Honourable
refrained, said boldly, "Try it with this," and under pretence of
changing her golfsticks possessed himself of her hand. For the first time
his touch left her apathetic.
"Now it is coming," she thought, and suddenly froze to a spectator of
the marionette show. As the Hon. Reginald went through his performance,
she felt with a shudder of horror over what brink she had nearly stepped.
The man was merely a magnificent animal! She, with her heart, her soul,
her brain, mated to that! Like a convict chained to a log. Not worthy of
him forsooth! "There's a gulf between us," she thought, "and I nearly
fell down it." And the Half-and-Half rose before her, clamouring,
pungent, deliciously seductive.
"Dear Mr. Winsor," she listened with no less interest to her own part
in the marionette performance, "it's really too bad of you. Just as I
was getting on so nicely, too!"
"Is that all you feel about--about our friendship?"
"All? Didn't you undertake to teach me golf? I haven't the faintest
desire not to go on ... as soon as we have escaped from this wretched
bunker. Come! Did you say the niblick?"
Reginald's manners were too good to permit him to swear, even at golf.
"One's body is like an Irish mud-cabin," Eileen reflected. "It shelters
both a soul and a pig."