Then he did, and Georgie nestled close to him with a sigh of satisfaction.  After a little while her indefatigable tongue began again.

“Ishmael, isn’t it funny to think it might never have happened?  Just suppose I had been actually married to Val instead of only sort of engaged....  I might have been, you know.”

“If you didn’t care about him,” began Ishmael, then stopped, feeling he was a poor advocate of a simple and unmistakable method of loving.

“Well, it’s very difficult for a girl,” explained Georgie.  “Even when I was getting fond of him I knew it wasn’t what I’d imagined falling in love to be like, but I thought it might be all I could manage.  You see, in real life, the second-best has such a disconcerting habit of coming along first.  You know all the time that it is only the second-best, but you think to yourself, ’Suppose the first-best never comes along for me, and I have said No to this, then there’ll be nothing but a third-best to fall back on.’  That’s why so many women marry just not the right man.”

“And I—­am I the first-best ...?” asked Ishmael in a low voice.

Georgie nodded.

“Ah!” she said; “you need never be jealous of poor Val.  If anyone has anything to be jealous over, it’s me—­not that I’m going to be.  After all, one can’t be a man’s first love and his last, and it’s more important to be his last!  What’s the matter ...?  You look funny, somehow....”

“Nothing,” said Ishmael; “I was only thinking what a dear you are.  You’re so sporting about everything.  And I—­sometimes in the middle of being happy everything seems suddenly empty and stupid to me, and I dread your finding that out.  Arid spaces....  I don’t know how to explain it.  They’ll come even in my love for you.”

Georgie nodded again, like a wise baby mandarin, as she sat there with her feet tucked up under her.  She stared ahead, and slowly a change came over her face, a change like the suffusion of dawn.  She caught his head to her and drew it to her breast.

“I’ve had nothing to make me tired yet, not like you.  I almost want you to feel tired and sad and lost if it’ll make you come to me, like this....”  She stroked his hair gently, holding his head very lightly.  He pressed it hard against her; he could feel her heart beating at his ear; he rubbed his cheek against her breast.  “You make me feel like a child again,” he said.  “No one has ever done, that....”

“Do you know,” said Georgie, still stroking rhythmically, “that every woman wants her husband to be four things—­her lover, her comrade, her child, and her master?  Did you know that?”

“No; I think I thought it was only the lover they cared about.  I’m very ignorant, Georgie!  Have I to be all that?  D’you think I can?”

“Which of them do you doubt?” asked Georgie slyly.

“Sometimes the lover, sometimes the comrade, sometimes the child, and always the master, though I’ll play at even that if you want me to.  But the other three—­I shall always be all of them underneath, even in the dry spaces.”