In the little room called the study, where there was not a single
book, or in the big clear drawing-room of pale chintzes and faded,
gilt-framed water-colours, he entertained her with the ceremony due
to a very beautiful and dignified young woman, producing the latest
letter from his son and reading extracts from it. Sometimes there was a
photograph of Francis on a horse, Francis with a dog, or Francis at a
steam plough or other agricultural machine, but these she only
pretended to examine. She had not the least desire to see how he
looked, for in these last months she had made a picture of her own and
she would not have it overlaid by any other. It was a game of
pretence; she knew she was wasting her time; she had her youth and
strength and money and limitless opportunity for wide experience, but
her very youth, and the feeling that it would last for ever, made her
careless of it. There was plenty of time, she could afford to waste
it, and gradually that occupation became a habit, almost an
absorption. She warned herself that she must shake it off, but the
effort would leave her very bare, it would rob her of the fairy cloak
which made her inner self invisible, and she clung to it, secure in
her ability to be rid of it if she chose.
Her intellect made no mistake about Francis Sales, but her
imagination, finding occupation where it could, began to endow him
with romance, and that scene among the primroses, the startlingly
green grass, the pervading blue of the air, the horse so indifferent
to the human drama, the dog trying to understand it, became the
salient event of her life because it had awakened her capacity for
dreaming.
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