Her searching enquiries about a
play whose production, on one of the latter scenes, had
provoked a considerable amount of scandal, led Darrow to
throw out laughingly: "To see THAT you'll have to wait
till you're married!" and his answer had sent her off at a
tangent.
"Oh, I never mean to marry," she had rejoined in a tone of
youthful finality.
"I seem to have heard that before!"
"Yes; from girls who've only got to choose!" Her eyes had
grown suddenly almost old. "I'd like you to see the only
men who've ever wanted to marry me! One was the doctor on
the steamer, when I came abroad with the Hokes: he'd been
cashiered from the navy for drunkenness. The other was a
deaf widower with three grown-up daughters, who kept a
clock-shop in Bayswater!--Besides," she rambled on, "I'm not
so sure that I believe in marriage. You see I'm all for
self-development and the chance to live one's life. I'm
awfully modern, you know."
It was just when she proclaimed herself most awfully modern
that she struck him as most helplessly backward; yet the
moment after, without any bravado, or apparent desire to
assume an attitude, she would propound some social axiom
which could have been gathered only in the bitter soil of
experience.
All these things came back to him as he sat beside her in
the theatre and watched her ingenuous absorption. It was on
"the story" that her mind was fixed, and in life also, he
suspected, it would always be "the story", rather than its
remoter imaginative issues, that would hold her.
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