§ 8

That evening, sitting at dinner with her family, she felt vaguely ashamed of herself—she had let herself go too far. As she watched her mother’s diamond rings flashing over her plate, as she listened to her father cynically demolishing the Washington conference, as she contemplated Doris eating asparagus in the gross and clumsy manner achieved only by the well-bred, the afternoon’s adventure took discreditable colours in her mind. What had made her feel like that towards Godfrey? Surely it was the same emotion which draws a man towards a pretty housemaid. The young farmer was good-looking and well-built—he had attracted her physically—and her body had mocked at the barriers set up by her mind, by education, birth, breeding and tradition.

She wondered guiltily what Jim would think of her if he knew. He would probably see a fresh reason for congratulating himself on the rupture of those loose yet hampering ties which had bound them for so long. She had never felt like that towards Jim, though she had accepted the physical element in their relation—thought, indeed, sometimes, that it was unduly preponderating, holding them together when ideas and ambitions would have drawn them apart. Was it possible after all that Godfrey’s attraction had not been merely physical—that there had been an allure in his simple, unaccustomed outlook on life as well as in his splendid frame?

Gervase came in late to dinner, and being tired did not talk much. After the meal was over, and Jenny was playing bridge with her parents and Doris, he sat in the window, turning over the pages of a book and looking out between the curtains at the pale Spring stars. When Lady Alard’s losses made her decide she was too tired to play any more and the game was broken up, Jenny went over and sat beside him. It had struck her that perhaps his life at the works, his association with working men, might enable him to shed some light on her problem. Not that she meant to confide in him, but there seemed to be in Gervase now a growing sanity of judgment; she had a new, odd respect for the experiences of the little brother’s mind.

“Gervase,” she said—“I suppose you could never make friends with anyone at the shop?”

“No—I’m afraid I couldn’t. At least not with anyone there now. But we get on all right together.”

“I suppose it’s the difference in education.”

“Partly—but chiefly the difference in our way of looking at things.”

“Surely that’s due to education.”

“Yes, if by education you mean breeding—the whole life. It’s not that we want different things, but we want them in a different way.”

“Do all men want the same things?”

He smiled.

“Yes—we all want money, women, and God.”

Jenny felt a little shocked.

“Some want one most, and some want another most,” continued Gervase—“and we’re most different in our ways of wanting money and most alike in our ways of wanting God.”

“How do you want money in different ways?”

“It’s not only the fact that what’s wealth to them is often poverty to us—it’s chiefly that they get their pleasure out of the necessities of life and we out of the luxuries. It’s never given you any actual pleasure, I suppose, to think that you’ve got a good house to live in and plenty to eat—but to those chaps it’s a real happiness and I’m not talking of those who’ve ever had to go without.”

Jenny was silent a moment. She hesitated over her next question.

“And what’s the difference in your ideas about women?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Their talk about women makes me sick—I feel in that matter we’ve got the pull over them. When men of our own set get on the subject, it’s different altogether, even at its worst. But I sometimes think that this is because their ideal of women is really so high that they don’t look upon a certain class of them as women at all.”

“You think their ideal of women in general is high?”

“Yes, that’s why their women are either good or bad. They won’t stand the intervening stages the way we do. They expect a great deal of the women they make their wives.”

“I suppose that a friendship between a woman of our class and a man of theirs would be much more difficult than a friendship between two men of different classes.”

“It would be quite impossible. They don’t understand friendship between men and women for one thing. I’m not sure that they haven’t got too much sense.”

Jenny rose and moved away. She found the conversation vaguely disturbing. Though, after all, she cried impatiently to herself, why should she? They hadn’t been discussing Godfrey—only the men where Gervase worked, who belonged altogether to a different class. But Godfrey, yeoman farmer of Fourhouses, solid, comfortable, respectable, able to buy land from impoverished Alard ... why should she think of him as in a class beneath her? Her parents would think so certainly, but that was because their ideas had grown old and stiff with Alard’s age ... mentally Alard was suffering from arterial sclerosis ... oh, for some new blood!