“Burton hasn’t even the grace to be jealous; he lets her do just what she pleases. He’s so mighty conceited that he never seems to think she may come across a man capable of understanding her.”
The commissioner smiled. “I don’t think much of Burton’s intellectual capacity, but I do give him credit for this--he understands his wife, and because he understands her, he trusts her absolutely. It’s no use, my dear boy, Simla will never have the pleasure of discussing Mrs. Burton in connection with any sort of scandal; she’s not that kind!”
The commissioner was right. Her husband never had reason to find fault with Mary, and since his death she had devoted herself to her boys and to the cultivation of her mind. She took it as a matter of course that men should fall in love with her; they always did. But her experience did not make her eager to investigate further the realms of marriage.
Men made love to her because they wanted to possess her. She was so tired of hearing, “Don’t you understand? I want you for myself, for my very own.”
Mary understood, but as yet she had felt no desire to belong to anybody in that exclusive fashion.
Andrew Methven touched her. Here at last was the Princely Giver she had dreamed of, as women will dream, the man ready to give everything, asking only for leave to lay his homage at her feet, nothing more.
When she had first met him, she set him down as one of those who are destined “to do something.” It was not his fate to remain an obscure Free Kirk minister, of that she was sure. The more she saw of him the more she felt the reality of the strange power that lay behind his apparently commonplace views of men and things. “It is there,” she said to herself exultingly, and now that he had made love to her in this strange, unusual way, she was seized with a passionate desire to take this man into her life, and help him to give form and substance to that latent force of his.
So Mary dreamed dreams while she listened to the minister as he discoursed upon the historical interests of the East Neuk; as they rode home swiftly and for the most part silently; as, the Duke having gone to bed, she sat at the open window and watched the moonlight on the sea.
Then she went and looked at the boys in their two little straight beds side by side. As she bent over the Duke he smiled, and threw his arm round her neck, murmuring sleepily, “Dear mater.”