She laughed, and she explained her laugh on the spur of the moment by the look of the people in the street below. There was a motor-car with an old lady swathed in blue veils, and a lady's maid on the seat opposite, holding a King Charles's spaniel; there was a country-woman wheeling a perambulator full of sticks down the middle of the road;there was a bailiff in gaiters discussing the state of the cattle market with a dissenting minister--so she defined them.
She ran over this list without any fear that her companion would think her trivial. Indeed, whether it was due to the warmth of the room or to the good roast beef, or whether Ralph had achieved the process which is called making up one's mind, certainly he had given up testing the good sense, the independent character, the intelligence shown in her remarks. He had been building one of those piles of thought, as ramshackle and fantastic as a Chinese pagoda, half from words let fall by gentlemen in gaiters, half from the litter in his own mind, about duck shooting and legal history, about the Roman occupation of Lincoln and the relations of country gentlemen with their wives, when, from all this disconnected rambling, there suddenly formed itself in his mind the idea that he would ask Mary to marry him. The idea was so spontaneous that it seemed to shape itself of its own accord before his eyes. It was then that he turned round and made use of his old, instinctive phrase:
"Well, Mary--?"
As it presented itself to him at first, the idea was so new and interesting that he was half inclined to address it, without more ado, to Mary herself. His natural instinct to divide his thoughts carefully into two different classes before he expressed them to her prevailed.
But as he watched her looking out of the window and describing the old lady, the woman with the perambulator, the bailiff and the dissenting minister, his eyes filled involuntarily with tears. He would have liked to lay his head on her shoulder and sob, while she parted his hair with her fingers and soothed him and said:
"There, there. Don't cry! Tell me why you're crying--"; and they would clasp each other tight, and her arms would hold him like his mother's.
He felt that he was very lonely, and that he was afraid of the other people in the room.
"How damnable this all is!" he exclaimed abruptly.
"What are you talking about?" she replied, rather vaguely, still looking out of the window.
He resented this divided attention more than, perhaps, he knew, and he thought how Mary would soon be on her way to America.
"Mary," he said, "I want to talk to you. Haven't we nearly done? Why don't they take away these plates?"Mary felt his agitation without looking at him; she felt convinced that she knew what it was that he wished to say to her.
"They'll come all in good time," she said; and felt it necessary to display her extreme calmness by lifting a salt-cellar and sweeping up a little heap of bread-crumbs.
"I want to apologize," Ralph continued, not quite knowing what he was about to say, but feeling some curious instinct which urged him to commit himself irrevocably, and to prevent the moment of intimacy from passing.
"I think I've treated you very badly. That is, I've told you lies. Did you guess that I was lying to you? Once in Lincoln's Inn Fields and again to-day on our walk. I am a liar, Mary. Did you know that? Do you think you do know me?""I think I do," she said.
At this point the waiter changed their plates.
"It's true I don't want you to go to America," he said, looking fixedly at the table-cloth. "In fact, my feelings towards you seem to be utterly and damnably bad," he said energetically, although forced to keep his voice low.
"If I weren't a selfish beast I should tell you to have nothing more to do with me. And yet, Mary, in spite of the fact that I believe what I'm saying, I also believe that it's good we should know each other--the world being what it is, you see--" and by a nod of his head he indicated the other occupants of the room, "for, of course, in an ideal state of things, in a decent community even, there's no doubt you shouldn't have anything to do with me--seriously, that is.""You forget that I'm not an ideal character, either," said Mary, in the same low and very earnest tones, which, in spite of being almost inaudible, surrounded their table with an atmosphere of concentration which was quite perceptible to the other diners, who glanced at them now and then with a queer mixture of kindness, amusement, and curiosity.
"I'm much more selfish than I let on, and I'm worldly a little--more than you think, anyhow. I like bossing things--perhaps that's my greatest fault. I've none of your passion for--" here she hesitated, and glanced at him, as if to ascertain what his passion was for--"for the truth," she added, as if she had found what she sought indisputably.
"I've told you I'm a liar," Ralph repeated obstinately.
"Oh, in little things, I dare say," she said impatiently. "But not in real ones, and that's what matters. I dare say I'm more truthful than you are in small ways. But I could never care"--she was surprised to find herself speaking the word, and had to force herself to speak it out--"for any one who was a liar in that way. I love the truth a certain amount--a considerable amount--but not in the way you love it." Her voice sank, became inaudible, and wavered as if she could scarcely keep herself from tears.
"Good heavens!" Ralph exclaimed to himself. "She loves me! Why did Inever see it before? She's going to cry; no, but she can't speak."The certainty overwhelmed him so that he scarcely knew what he was doing; the blood rushed to his cheeks, and although he had quite made up his mind to ask her to marry him, the certainty that she loved him seemed to change the situation so completely that he could not do it.
He did not dare to look at her. If she cried, he did not know what he should do. It seemed to him that something of a terrible and devastating nature had happened. The waiter changed their plates once more.
