It
makes you handsomer--yes, even handsomer!--somehow. But all the while I
am remembering that England is just an ordinary island inhabited by a
number of ordinary persons, for the most of whom I have no particular
feeling one way or the other.".
Pevensey looked at her for a while with queer tenderness. Then he
smiled. "No, I could not quite make you understand, my dear. But, ah,
why fuddle that quaint little brain by trying to understand such matters
as lie without your realm? For a woman's kingdom is the home, my dear,
and her throne is in the heart of her husband--"
"All this is but another way of saying your lordship would have us cups
upon a shelf," she pointed out--"in readiness for your leisure."
He shrugged, said "Nonsense!" and began more lightly to talk of other
matters. Thus and thus he would do in France, such and such trinkets he
would fetch back--"as toys for the most whimsical, the loveliest and the
most obstinate child in all the world," he phrased it. And they would be
married, Pevensey declared, in September: nor (he gaily said) did he
propose to have any further argument about it. Children should be
seen--the proverb was dusty, but it particularly applied to pretty
children.
Cynthia let him talk. She was just a little afraid of his self
confidence, and of this tall nobleman's habit of getting what he wanted,
in the end: but she dispiritedly felt that Pevensey had failed her. He
treated her as a silly infant: and his want of her, even in that
capacity, was a secondary matter: he was going into France, for all his
petting talk, and was leaving her to shift as she best might, until he
could spare the time to resume his love-making.
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