Page:The Trespasser, Lawrence, 1912.djvu/134

126 with no money, when we ran away to Brighton and got married. Poor old Pater, he took it awfully well. I have been a frightful drag on him, you know.

“There’s the romance. I wonder how it will all end.”

Helena laughed, and he did not detect her extreme bitterness of spirit.

They walked on in silence for some time. He was thinking back, before Helena’s day. This left her very much alone, and forced on her the idea that, after all, love, which she chose to consider as single and wonderful a thing in a man’s life as birth, or adolescence, or death, was temporary, and formed only an episode. It was her hour of disillusion.

“Come to think of it,” Siegmund continued, “I have always shirked. Whenever I’ve been in a tight corner I’ve gone to Pater.”

“I think,” she said, “marriage has been a tight corner you couldn’t get out of to go to anybody.”

“Yet I’m here,” he answered simply.

The blood suffused her face and neck.

“And some men would have made a better job of it. When it’s come to sticking out against Beatrice, and sailing the domestic ship in spite of her, I’ve always funked. I tell you I’m something of a moral coward.”

He had her so much on edge she was inclined to answer, “So be it.” Instead, she ran back over her own history: it consisted of petty discords in contemptible surroundings, then of her dreams and fancies, finally—Siegmund.

“In my life,” she said, with the fine, grating discord in her tones, “I might say always, the real life has seemed just outside—brownies running and fairies