“I am stupid about him,” she admitted, settling down in her chair, “but if he had come it would have been lovely.  What would he think if he came now and found us two whom he loves most sitting here silent, almost sulky, because we have fixed the time of his marriage?  He would not understand, of course.  When a man is in love marriage loses all importance.  He thinks that he could wait for ever.  He never realises, as women do, that it is not love that matters but what we do with it.  Why do I say as women do?  Only women like me who have through making all possible mistakes found out the truth by the process of elimination.  This girl is as unprovident as Richard is.  So unprovident that I am afraid she is angry with me for insisting that she should put her capital of passion to good uses.”  And indeed Ellen was sitting there very stiffly, turning her hands together and looking down on them as if she despised them for their cantrips.  She wished her marriage had not been decided quite like this.  Of course she wanted to be married, because, whatever the marriage-laws were like, there was no other way by which she and Richard could tell everybody what they were to each other.  But she had wanted the ceremony as secret as possible, as little overlooked by any other human being, and she fancifully desired it to take place in some high mountain chapel where there was no congregation but casqued marble men and the faith professed was so mystical that the priest was as inhuman as a prayer.  Thus their vows would, though recorded, have had the sweet quality of unwritten melodies that are sung only for the beloved who has inspired them.  But now this marriage was to be performed with the extremest publicity before a crowd of issues, if not of persons.  It was to be a subordinate episode in a pageant the plot of which she did not know.

Marion, watching her face, saw the faint twitches of resentment playing about her mouth and felt some remorse.  “She would be so happy just being Richard’s sweetheart, if I did not interfere,” she thought.  “Ah, how the old tyrannise over the young....”  And there came on her a sudden chill as she remembered of what character that tyranny could be.  She remembered one day, when she was nineteen, waking from sleep to find old people round her.  She had been having such a lovely dream.  On her lover’s arm, she had been walking across the fields in innocent sunshiny weather, and he had been laughing and full of a far greater joy in impersonal things than she had ever known him.  When he saw gorse in life he would repeat the country catch, “When the gorse is out of bloom then kissing’s out of fashion,” but in her dream he laughed to see fire and water meet where the gorse grew on the sheep-pond’s broken lip.  He had liked the white cloths bleaching on the grass, and the song the lark in the sky twirled like a lad throwing and catching a coin, and the spinney on the field’s slope’s heights, where the tide of spring broke in a green surf of budding undergrowth at the feet of black bare trees.