“Yes,” I said, “really! and _now_ what do you think?”
“Yes,” she said, a little flushed; “but be sensible! Do you really mean
you’ve got a Rise, all at once, of two hundred a year?”
“To marry on—yes.”
She scrutinised me a moment. “You’ve done this as a surprise!” she
said, and laughed at my laughter. She had become radiant, and that made
me radiant, too.
“Yes,” I said, “yes,” and laughed no longer bitterly.
She clasped her hands and looked me in the eyes.
She was so pleased that I forgot absolutely my disgust of a moment
before. I forgot that she had raised her price two hundred pounds a
year and that I had bought her at that.
“Come!” I said, standing up; “let’s go towards the sunset, dear, and
talk about it all. Do you know—this is a most beautiful world, an
amazingly beautiful world, and when the sunset falls upon you it makes
you into shining gold. No, not gold—into golden glass.... Into
something better that either glass or gold.”...
And for all that evening I wooed her and kept her glad. She made me
repeat my assurances over again and still doubted a little.
We furnished that double-fronted house from attic—it ran to an attic—to
cellar, and created a garden.
“Do you know Pampas Grass?” said Marion. “I love Pampas Grass... if
there is room.”
“You shall have Pampas Grass,” I declared. And there were moments as we
went in imagination about that house together, when my whole being
cried out to take her in my arms—now. But I refrained. On that aspect
of life I touched very lightly in that talk, very lightly because I had
had my lessons. She promised to marry me within two months’ time.
Shyly, reluctantly, she named a day, and next afternoon, in heat and
wrath, we “broke it off” again for the last time. We split upon
procedure. I refused flatly to have a normal wedding with wedding cake,
in white favours, carriages and the rest of it. It dawned upon me
suddenly in conversation with her and her mother, that this was
implied. I blurted out my objection forthwith, and this time it wasn’t
any ordinary difference of opinion; it was a “row.” I don’t remember a
quarter of the things we flung out in that dispute. I remember her
mother reiterating in tones of gentle remonstrance: “But, George dear,
you _must_ have a cake—to send home.” I think we all reiterated things.
I seem to remember a refrain of my own: “A marriage is too sacred a
thing, too private a thing, for this display. Her father came in and
stood behind me against the wall, and her aunt appeared beside the
sideboard and stood with arms, looking from speaker to speaker, a
sternly gratified prophetess. It didn’t occur to me then! How painful
it was to Marion for these people to witness my rebellion.
“But, George,” said her father, “what sort of marriage do you want? You
don’t want to go to one of those there registry offices?”
“That’s exactly what I’d like to do. Marriage is too private a thing—”
“I shouldn’t feel married,” said Mrs. Ramboat.
“Look here, Marion,” I said; “we are going to be married at a registry
office. I don’t believe in all these fripperies and superstitions, and
I won’t submit to them. I’ve agreed to all sorts of things to please
you.”
“What’s he agreed to?” said her father—unheeded.
“I can’t marry at a registry office,” said Marion, sallow-white.
“Very well,” I said. “I’ll marry nowhere else.”
“I can’t marry at a registry office.”
“Very well,” I said, standing up, white and tense and it amazed me, but
I was also exultant; “then we won’t marry at all.”
She leant forward over the table, staring blankly. But presently her
half-averted face began to haunt me as she had sat at the table, and
her arm and the long droop of her shoulder.