He thought, as he had thought again and again, of her artlessness, her ignorance, and her total absence of compunction.  It seemed so wonderful.  She drifted toward him as the petal of a flower comes on running water, as corn seeds blow through the air, as anything small and light obeying a natural law.  She did not in the least understand social conventions.  She was not troubled with one thought of right or wrong; she neither meditated nor remembered.  How wonderful.  The ten commandments and the catechism that she knew by heart, all the hymns she had sung and all the sermons she had heard, did not exert the faintest restraining influence.  They had no real meaning for her probably, and she could not therefore bring them into relation with concrete facts.  In her innocence, in her virginal simplicity, she would keep the book of life close—­sealed until he opened it roughly for her at its ugliest page.

He, or somebody else!

Suddenly he threw away the faded wood-blossoms, sprang up from the tree, and paced to and fro.  A wave of revolt came sweeping through and through him.  Was he not making mountains out of mole-hills?

If he could trample down all this sentimental fiddle-de-dee, what was the plain English of the case so far as she was concerned?  Unbidden, innumerable circumstances stored from local knowledge offered themselves as guides for argument.  Take any girl of that class—­well, what are her chances?  Why, you are lucky if you keep ’em straight until the time comes to send ’em out into domestic service; their parents scarcely expect it, barely seem to desire it.  But after that time, when they get among strangers and there’s nobody with an eye on them, they fall as victims—­if you choose to call it so—­to the first marauder—­to the young master, the nephew home for his Christmas holidays, or the man who comes to tune the piano.  If not himself, it would be somebody else.

And he thought.  “Blast it all, am I a man or a mouse?  Who’s to judge me, or stan’ in my way, if I do what I please?  Suppose it’s found out, well, it must be smoothed over, covered up, and put behind the fireplace.  I shan’t be Number One that’s bin th’ same road!” and he remembered how lightly other married men, his neighbors, country farmers, or town tradesmen, amused themselves with their servants, and how their middle-aged wives just had to grin and bear it.  “An’ Mavis,” he thought, “can do the same.  Heavens an’ earth, I’ve got an answer ready if she tries to make a fuss, or wants to take the dinner-bell and go round as public crier—­an answer that ought to flatten her as if a traction engine had bin over her.  ’My lass, who began it?  Bring out your slate and put it alongside mine, an’ we’ll see which looks dirtiest, all said and done.’” While he was thinking in this manner, his face became very ugly, with hard deep lines in it, and about the mouth that cruel pouting expression once seen by Mavis.

He came back to the tree; and sat down, letting his hands hang loose, his head droop, and his shoulders contract.  The fire had gone cold again.