Balloons | Page 6

life----"
She was looking dreamily in front of her to the blue beyond the
mimosa.
"The sea is jolly," he said.
"To feel that you are leaving land behind you and your friends and your
relations and your duties and what are called your pleasures. To be
free," she murmured.
"There's nothing like horses," he said. "Their very smell does you good.
An hour's gallop before breakfast in summer, a twenty minutes' run
with the hounds in winter----"
A week later they were engaged to be married. I wondered whether he
would take to yachting or she to riding or both to golf.
I didn't see them for five years. And then, I met her at Melton. She had
taken a house for the winter. "So he won," I reflected to myself.
"Have you done much yachting lately?" I asked her.
"Yachting?" she said, "why it's my idea of hell. I'm the worst sailor in
the world. A sea as calm as a pond finishes me."

"How is your husband?" I murmured weakly. "Is he coming down here
to hunt?"
"Tommy?" she laughed. "Why he's never known a horse from a cow."

IV
"DO YOU REMEMBER----?"
[To LESLIE HARTLEY]
There are so many delightful things about being a bride besides actual
happiness, little peaks of pleasure that gradually sink into the level of
existence, unimportant, all-important things that never come again. To
begin with, there is your wedding ring which keeps glistening up at you,
unexpectedly making such an absurd difference, not only to the look of
your hand but to everything else, as well. And there are your trunks,
shiny and untravelled, with glaring new initials almost shouting at you,
so very unlike other people's battered luggage with half obliterated
labels sprawling over it.
And trousseau clothes are quite unlike other clothes--not prettier, often
uglier--but different. Your shoes and stockings match, not yet having
begun that uneven race which, starting from the same mole, ends with a
fawn-colored shoe and a grey blue stocking. Your hats go with your
dresses and your sunshades with both. You have an appropriate
garment for all occasions, instead of always being--as you once were
and soon will become again--short of something. Altogether, there is no
other word for it--you are equipped.
And then you feel exhilarated and responsible--your jewels are still
new and so is the strange, beautifully embroidered monogram on your
handkerchiefs and underclothes. Also, for the first time in your life, you
have a jet evening dress with a train and your maid calls you "Madam."
Lucy was extremely pleased about all of these things. She was pleased,
too, to have married a foreigner, to be sailing away into a new milieu,

where she would be surrounded by the strange exciting faces of her
husband's friends. It would be delightful to have nothing to do, but
make yourself liked, to be automatically disentangled from all of your
own complicated, complicating relationships with nothing around you
but a new world to conquer. And how thrilled and curious every one
must be about her. What sort of a woman had succeeded in catching
dear old Tony! Tony, who was so delightfully, so essentially, a man's
man. There had been Vivian, of course, but no one quite knew the
rights and the wrongs of that and it was over anyway. Tony was so
deuced unsusceptible (Lucy prided herself on being able to think in
English), unsophisticated, too, about women, but with a sense of
self-preservation like an animal's. And now he had gone and married an
American and a Bostonian. Americans, one knew, were heiresses and
Bostonians were blue-stockings. The lady, it appeared, was not very
rich, but of course, Tony would never have married for money. It was
all very puzzling.
And then, Lucy imagined herself walking into a room full of strange,
curious faces and some one murmured, "That is Tony's wife," and
every one looked up. She was wearing a shimmering, silvery blue dress
and she was looking her very, very best. An old lady told her that she
ought still to be in school and a young man told her that she was a jolly
lucky woman and Tony a jolly lucky man, by Jove.
Lucy was sure that that was the way Englishmen talked.
And on their way home, people agreed that they could understand any
man's falling in love with her. Tony talked a lot about his men friends.
Women meant nothing to him. He had, Lucy knew, once been engaged
to a woman--Vivian, she had been called--rumour had woven a pattern
of legends about it, but he had never seemed anxious to discuss it.
People said he had behaved badly--but how was one to tell? Those
things were always so complicated. Usually, every one ended by
behaving badly.