out meals or doing some such service, and to me—for my mother’s sake and my own—she was always welcoming and kind. Puss was a youngster of fourteen perhaps, of whom a hard bright stare, and a pale skin like her mother’s, are the chief traces on my memory. All these people were very kind to me, and among them there was a common recognition, sometimes very agreeably finding expression, that I was—“clever.” They all stood about me as if they were a little at a loss.
“Sit down!” said her father. “Give him a chair, Puss.”
We talked a little stiffly—they were evidently surprised by my sudden apparition, dusty, fatigued, and white faced; but Nettie did not remain to keep the conversation going.
“There!” she cried suddenly, as if she were vexed. “I declare!” and she darted out of the room.
“Lord! what a girl it is!” said Mrs. Stuart. “I don’t know what’s come to her.”
It was half an hour before Nettie came back. It seemed a long time to me, and yet she had been running, for when she came in again she was out of breath. In the meantime, I had thrown out casually that I had given up my place at Rawdon’s. “I can do better than that,” I said.
“I left my book in the dell,” she said, panting. “Is tea ready?” and that was her apology. . .
We didn’t shake down into comfort even with the coming of the tea-things. Tea at the gardener’s cottage was a serious meal, with a big cake and little cakes, and preserves and fruit, a fine spread upon a table. You must imagine me, sullen, awkward, and preoccupied, perplexed by the something that was inexplicably unexpected in Nettie, saying little, and glowering across the cake at her, and all the eloquence I had been concentrating for the previous twenty-four hours, miserably lost somewhere in the back of my mind. Nettie’s father tried to set me talking; he had a liking for my gift of ready speech, for his own ideas came with difficulty, and it pleased and astonished him to hear me pouring out my views. Indeed, over there I was, I think, even more talkative than with Parload, though to the world at large I was a shy young lout. “You ought to write it out for the newspapers,” he used to say. “That’s what you ought to do. I never heard such nonsense.”
Or, “You’ve got the gift of the gab, young man. We ought to ha’ made a lawyer of you.”
But that afternoon, even in his eyes, I didn’t shine. Failing any other stimulus, he reverted to my search for a situation, but even that did not engage me.
Section 5
For a long time I feared I should have to go back to Clayton without another word to Nettie, she seemed insensible to the need I felt for a talk with her, and I was thinking even of a sudden demand for that before them all. It was a transparent manoeuver of her mother’s who had been watching my face, that sent us out at last together to do something—I forget now what—in one of the greenhouses. Whatever that little mission may have been it was the merest, most barefaced excuse, a door to shut, or a window to close, and I don’t think it got done.
Nettie hesitated and obeyed. She led the way through one of the hot-houses. It was a low, steamy, brick-floored alley between staging that bore a close crowd of pots and ferns, and behind big branching plants that were spread and nailed overhead so as to make an impervious cover of leaves, and in that close green privacy she stopped and turned on me suddenly like a creature at bay.
“Isn’t the maidenhair fern lovely?” she said, and looked at me with eyes that said, “NOW.”
“Nettie,” I began, “I was a fool to write to you as I did.”
She startled me by the assent that flashed out upon her face. But she said nothing, and stood waiting.
“Nettie,” I plunged, “I can’t do without you. I—I love you.”
“If you loved me,” she said trimly, watching the white fingers she plunged among the green branches of a selaginella, “could you write the things you do to me?”
“I don’t mean them,” I said. “At least not always.”
I thought really they were very good letters, and that Nettie was stupid to think otherwise, but I was for the moment clearly aware of the impossibility of conveying that to her.
“You wrote them.”
“But then I tramp seventeen miles to say I don’t mean them.”
“Yes. But perhaps you do.”
I think I was at a loss; then I said, not very clearly, “I don’t.”
“You think you—you love me, Willie. But you don’t.”
“I do. Nettie! You know I do.”
For answer she shook her head.
I made what I thought was a most heroic plunge. “Nettie,” I said, “I’d rather have you than—than my own opinions.”
The selaginella still engaged her. “You think so now,” she said.
I broke out into protestations.
“No,” she said shortly. “It’s different now.”
“But why should two letters make so much difference?” I said.
“It isn’t only the letters. But it is different. It’s different for good.”
She halted a little with that sentence, seeking her expression. She looked up abruptly into my eyes and moved, indeed slightly, but with the intimation that she thought our talk might end.
But I did not mean it to end like that.
“For good?” said I. “No! . . Nettie! Nettie! You don’t mean that!”
“I do,” she said deliberately, still looking at me, and with all her pose conveying her finality. She seemed to brace herself for the outbreak that must follow.
Of course I became wordy. But I did not submerge her. She stood entrenched, firing her contradictions like guns into my scattered discursive attack. I remember that our talk took the absurd form of disputing whether I could be in love with her or not. And there was I, present in evidence, in a deepening and widening distress of soul because she could stand there, defensive, brighter and prettier than ever, and in some inexplicable way cut off from me and inaccessible.
You know, we had never been together before without little enterprises of endearment, without a faintly guilty, quite delightful excitement.
I pleaded, I argued. I tried to show that even my harsh and difficult letters came from my desire to come wholly into contact with her. I made exaggerated fine statements of the longing I felt for her when I was away, of the shock and misery of finding her estranged and cool. She looked at me, feeling the emotion of my speech and impervious to its ideas. I had no doubt—whatever poverty in my words, coolly written down now—that I was eloquent then. I meant most intensely what I said, indeed I was wholly concentrated upon it. I was set upon conveying to her with absolute sincerity my sense of distance, and the greatness of my desire. I toiled toward her painfully and obstinately through a jungle of words.
Her face changed very slowly—by such imperceptible
