The Misses Mallett | Page 3

this he offered her, and if she could, as she foresaw, only play a greater one through the agency of some man, she must have that man colossal, for she was only twenty-three years old.
'No,' she said firmly, 'we are not suited to each other.'
'You are to me.' His angry helplessness seemed to darken the sunlight. 'You are to me. No one else. I've known you all my life. Rose, think about it!'
'I shall--but I shan't change. I don't believe you really love me, Francis, but you want some one you can growl at legitimately. I don't think you would find me satisfactory. Another woman might enjoy the privilege.'
He made a wild movement, startling to the horse. 'You don't understand me!'
'Well, then, that ought to settle it. And now I'm going.'
'Don't go,' he pleaded. 'And look here, you might have loosened your girths.'
'I might, but I didn't expect to be here so long. I didn't expect to be so pleasantly entertained.' She put out her hand for his shoulder, and, bending unwillingly, he received her foot.
'You needn't have said that,' he muttered, 'about being entertained.'
'You're so ungracious, Francis.'
'I can't help it when I care so much.'
From her high seat she looked at him with a sort of envy. 'It must be rather nice to feel anything deeply enough to make you rude.'
'You torture me,' he said.
She was hurt by the sight of his suffering, she wished she could give him what he wanted, she felt as though she were injuring a child, yet her youth resented his childishness: it claimed a passion capable of overwhelming her. She hardened a little. 'Good-bye,' she said, 'and if I were you, I should certainly go abroad.'
'I shall!' he threatened her.
'Good-bye, then,' she repeated amiably.
'Don't go,' he begged in a low voice. 'Rose, I don't believe you know what you are doing, and you've always loved the country, you've always loved our place. You like our house. You told me once you envied us our rookery.'
'Yes, I love the rookery,' she said.
'And you'd have your own stables and as many horses as you wanted--'
'And milk from our own cows! And home-laid eggs!'
'Ah, you're laughing at me. You always do.'
'So you see,' she said, bending a little towards him, 'I shouldn't make a very good companion.'
'But I could put up with it from you!' he cried. 'I could put up with anything from you.'
She made a gesture. That was where he chiefly failed. The colossal gentleman of her imagination was a tyrant.
* * * * *

She rode home, up and along the track, on to the high road with its grass borders and across the shadows of the elm branches which striped the road with black. It was a long road accompanied on one side and for about two miles by a tall, smooth wall, unscalable, guarding the privacy of a local magnate's park. It was a pitiless wall, without a chink, without a roughness that could be seized by hands; it was higher than Rose Mallett as she sat on her big horse and, but for the open fields on the other side where lambs jumped and bleated, that road would have oppressed the spirit, for the wall was a solid witness to the pride and the power of material possession. Rose Mallett hated it, not on account of the pride and the power, but because it was ugly, monstrous, and so inhospitably smooth that not a moss would grow on it. More vaguely, she disliked it because it set so definite a limit to her path. She was always glad when she could turn the corner and, leaving the wall to prolong the side of the right angle it made at this point, she could take a side road, edging a wooded slope. That slope made one side of the gorge through which the river ran, and, looking down through the trees, she caught glimpses of water and a red scar of rock on the other cliff.
The sound of a steamer's paddles threshing the water came to her clearly, and the crying of the gulls was so familiar that she hardly noticed it. And all the way she was thinking of Francis Sales, his absurdity, his good looks and his distress; but in the permanence of his distress, even in its sincerity, she did not much believe, for he had failed to touch anything but her pity, and that failure seemed an argument against the vehemence of his love. Yet she liked him, she had always liked him since, as a little girl, she had been taken by her stepsisters to a haymaking party at Sales Hall.
They had gone in a hired carriage, but one so smart and well-equipped that it might have been their own, and she remembered the smell of the