Page:The White Peacock, Lawrence, 1911.djvu/467

Rh her a light, pleased with the mark of recklessness in her.

“It is ten years to-day since my party at Woodside,” she said, reaching for the small Roman salt-cellar of green jade that she used as an ash-tray.

“My Lord—ten years!” he exclaimed bitterly. “It seems a hundred.”

“It does and it doesn’t,” she answered, smiling.

“If I look straight back, and think of my excitement, it seems only yesterday. If I look between then and now, at all the days that lie between, it is an age.”

“If I look at myself,” he said, “I think I am another person altogether.”

“You have changed,” she agreed, looking at him sadly. “There is a great change—but you are not another person. I often think—there is one of his old looks, he is just the same at the bottom!”

They embarked on a barge of gloomy recollections and drifted along the soiled canal of their past.

“The worst of it is,” he said. “I have got a miserable carelessness, a contempt for things. You know I had such a faculty for reverence. I always believed in things.”

“I know you did,” she smiled. “You were so humbly-minded—too humbly-minded, I always considered. You always thought things had a deep religious meaning, somewhere hidden, and you reverenced them. Is it different now?”

“You know me very well,” he laughed. “What is there left for me to believe in, if not in myself?”

“You have to live for your wife and children,” she said with firmness.