She was pleasantly surprised when a maid ushered them into a tiled hallway and took their coats. The only sound was a distant, unidentifiable murmur. And the hallway, though rather small, was neat and spotlessly clean. Sylvia Broome came hurrying down the staircase before they could be shown into any room, her hands extended.
"How wonderful!" she said. "I am so happy you have come. We do not have very many visitors during the daytime. Some people, I believe, think that they will be coming into a den of thieves if they set foot in here." She laughed lightly and instructed the maid to take Lord Chartleigh to her husband.
"That is, if you wish to meet our boys?" she said, eyebrows lifted in inquiry.
"I had hoped to do so," Ralph said. "Will your husband mind?"
Georgiana was taken to a cozy sitting room by her hostess, who immediately rang for tea. And she found again that she liked this girl, who was the same age as herself yet who seemed very mature.
"I am so happy to see you, Georgiana," Sylvia said. "I lived a quiet life in the country until last spring, you know, but I always had my cousin with me to talk to. She is on a wedding trip in Italy and like to be away for almost a year if Edward has his way. And I do miss her. Do you mind my calling you by your given name?"
"My friends call me Georgie," Georgiana said.
Sylvia laughed. "I like it," she said. "It suits you. You used to be quite a madcap, didn't you? I remember hearing of your racing in the park during the fashionable hour, when it is considered quite unacceptable to move faster than a slow crawl."
"Oh dear," Georgiana said. "That does seem to be a long time ago. Is it your cousin who married the Earl of Raymore? I heard of his wedding a few months ago."
Sylvia nodded. "We were both most fortunate," she said. "We both made love matches. Is it not wonderful to love one's husband? I can tell that you and Lord Chartleigh are very attached to each other too. He is a lovely person. I had not met him before Standen's party."
"He has been at university," Georgiana explained. "He is only one-and-twenty, you know. Three years older than I. I had not met him myself before... Well, he offered for me at our second meeting, you see. It was an arranged marriage."
"How dreadful for you!" Sylvia exclaimed. "But how wonderful to discover that your parents had allied you to the very man you would have chosen for yourself if given the chance."
"Yes," Georgiana agreed. "Except that I do not believe I would have had the good sense to choose him. I have grown to love him since our wedding."
Sylvia laughed again. "I was foolish enough to let Nigel talk me into betrothing myself to his brother," she said. "It was only afterward that we realized that it was each other we wanted. I had to think of a desperate scheme to set things right. I still feel almost guilty when I think of it. Almost! But when I look at Standen, I know that we would have been very unhappy. As a brother-in-law I can admire him and even feel affection for him. As a husband I would have feared him and come to hate him."
The hour that passed until Ralph and Nigel Broome joined them in the sitting room seemed no longer than five minutes. Georgiana found a very easy friendship developing between Sylvia and her. The other couple had promised to dine with them before they left for home.
Ralph was impressed with Nigel Broome's school. He talked to her on the journey home about his own dream of doing something worthwhile with his time and fortune and position of influence. Chartleigh was a large estate. Could he set up some sort of project that would occupy the people from the village workhouse? he wondered. Charity was not the answer. He could give all the inmates of the institution enough money on which to live in comfort and still not beggar himself. But that would not restore their self-respect or satisfy their human need to feel in control of their own lives and destinies. It was jobs they needed. What did Georgiana think?
Georgiana had never done any thinking along those lines. She was in the habit of agreeing with the general feeling of her class that the poor were poor because they were idle and lazy. But she had learned respect for Ralph's mind. If he said these people needed jobs and faith in themselves, then it must be so. She felt a warm glow of happiness that he would discuss his thoughts with her and ask her opinion. Just as if she were a real person who mattered, instead of a feather-brained female who needed to be bullied to stay out of scrapes.
"I don't know, Ralph," she said. "But I am sure you will think of a solution. And I know it will be the right one. And if it means spending a great deal of money, you are not to mind me. I shall be quite content to stay at Chartleigh if we cannot afford to keep up the town house. And I have quite enough clothes and faradiddles to last me until I am quite middle-aged."
And what was more, she thought in some surprise as he laughed in amusement and assured her that he did not think they would be reduced to utter destitution, she meant it. She could live naked on a desert island for the rest of her life, provided Ralph was there with her, she thought with all the intense unrealism of one newly and deeply in love.
They were a happy seven weeks.
They were not quite so happy for Ralph. He was happy when he was with Georgiana and when he was with Sally. But he could find no peace of mind when he was alone.
He was delighted with the way his relationship with his wife was developing. She appeared to have lost her fear of him and a fragile friendship was growing. He was making an effort to spend more time with her, to get to know her, and to share something of himself with her. The last was not easy to do. Ralph had always been a very private person. He was accustomed to being alone, to feeling somewhat despised by most of the people with whom he was forced to associate. He had accepted his essential loneliness.
It was not easy for him to open his mind to his wife and risk indifference or ridicule. He took her to look at paintings and other works of art that meant a great deal to him. It would have hurt to find her impatient or openly contemptuous. And he shared some of his favorite works of literature with her, mostly poetry over which he had pondered for years. He knew that she was not a reader, that she had no use for the education that had been offered to her as a girl. She had told him as much.
He found true delight in discovering that she was receptive to the important things of his world. She had no confidence in her own opinions. She constantly belittled the power of her own mind. But she had an intelligence that seemed to have been untapped in her eighteen years of life. Her ideas were fresh, untainted by the opinions of books and scholars. More than once she gave him a fresh insight into some work he had long been familiar with.
And she showed no reluctance to use her mind. It seemed as if she genuinely wished to enter his world, to be a companion to him. One evening she had been invited to join a theater party with her own family. Knowing that he would be at home alone if she went, she had chosen rather to remain with him. They had spent the evening in the library, quietly involved in their own pursuits until she took a volume of Pope's poetry from a shelf and drew a chair close to his. She had smiled eagerly and handed him the book when he closed his own and put it down.
But it was not his wish to change her. He delighted in her gaiety, which he had so little suspected when they first married. She loved company and shone when other people were around her. She seemed made to dance, to converse, and to laugh. It became his practice to accept invitations that his own inclination would have led him to refuse. He did not particularly enjoy these parties, but he delighted in watching her, her face animated and flushed, her small, shapely figure always at the center of activity.
She was very popular with men; he guessed it was because she always looked directly at them and talked quite candidly. She never put on feminine airs, and she never flirted. Perhaps it was because of that fact that it never occurred to him to be jealous. And she did not ignore him. She always appeared to know where he was in a room and frequently looked across at him and smiled. He was very proud of her. How other men must envy him his wife!
He thought several times of trying to begin a physical relationship with her. There seemed to be no reason why he should not. She appeared to like him. She certainly made no attempts to avoid his company. But he was afraid. Things were going perhaps too well between them. He did not have the courage to risk losing all by forcing himself on her before she was ready. He would wait a little longer. He loved her too dearly to risk losing her.
His relationship with Sally Shaw had become much more serious than he had ever intended. He had certainly not planned for it to last so long. He had merely wanted to gain some experience and some confidence, He now had both and there was no reason to continue seeing her. But he found that he could not face the thought of losing her.
When he was with her, he was happy, utterly so. She had a perfect body. He had never failed to be totally satisfied with their couplings. He knew a feeling of well-being when he was with her that stayed with him for the days in between. Had that been the whole of it, though, he felt that he would have been willing to put an end to their affair.
