Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/71

Rh That was a shock too. Digby had never thought of Stella as a baby. She was a thing that shone in beauty under pine-trees and the moon.

He bowed but could find nothing to say. The situation was overwhelmingly unexpected, and he had never been in a situation before. That indeed had been the cardinal fact of his existence until Stella came to displace it. "I'm—I'm glad," he muttered, "very glad."

Mrs. Marwood tactfully left the young people.

"I think she's wonderful," said Stella enthusiastically."And she speaks so warmly about you. Her knowing you has made all the difference in the world Dad thought you were just an ordinary house-party young man."

Those words rang dismally in Digby's heart. He knew that described him exactly, and he stood stupidly wondering if situations always forced out the truth and if that was why people avoided them.

"You don't look pleased," said Stella.

"O! yes. I'm pleased. Only I didn't expect—"

"What?"

"Mrs. Marwood."

How he got married Digby never knew. He had painful flashes and glimmerings through the whirl of women and clothes and house-agents' catalogues which a wedding seemed to entail. It was all very painful and humiliating and whenever a decision had to be made it was referred to Mrs. Marwood, until at last by familiarity it began to be forced upon Digby’s sluggish memory that there was nothing new in all this and that Mrs. Marwood had interfered in his existence before, had indeed always done so ever since he had known her, though he could not exactly say how: a subtle process that had been spread out over so many years that he had no more suspected it than he had the connection between his income and what the newspapers called social injustice. For the first time in his life he was filled with a feeling of active dislike, and as he stood in his flat, pulling his moustache and slowly cogitating this new sensation of his, he was astonished to hear himself say: