d the mill
like bees, and in his expressions of approval to Ishmael was mingled a
subtle strain of warning, almost of menace. And to himself as the days
went by and Phoebe was always there for him to see and caress when he
felt inclined, her yielding sweetness ever ready for him to draw on, her
gentle stupidity hidden under her adoration, he admitted that he did not
altogether want to withdraw. After all, what did it matter? Phoebe had
many refinements of heart and temper which surely could be held to
outweigh her little ignorances, and now that, with the removal of
Blanche, the outer world was, he told himself, cut off from him, he
refused to see that to ally himself with the Lenines of the mill
mattered as much as the Parson, in his old-fashioned Toryism, seemed to
think. A woman takes her husband's position; and as to that, what, he
asked bitterly, was his position that any woman should want to share it?
Phoebe did want to; she had shown all her heart so plainly in that
cry--genuine in that she believed it herself; and Phoebe was kind and
perilously sweet.... The days went on, and Vassie's letter of argument
and protest was less determined than it would have been if she herself
had not been engrossed in her own affairs. And stronger even that the
dread of hurting Phoebe, of the terrible scenes that would of
necessity occur, than his own loneliness, was the enemy within himself
that every time he caressed Phoebe mounted to his brain and told him
it was, after all, well worth while.

It fell to the Parson's bitter lot to marry them in the early autumn of
that year. Archelaus had now been away a year, and he had neither come
back nor written, and not till several months later did he suddenly
reappear, after the habit of the born rover.

They were months of mingled wonder and dismay for Ishmael. He had
married a girl who had only one talent, but that was the oldest in the
world--she was a born lover. She, who in many ways was so startlingly
lacking in refinement, had a genius for the little lures, the ways with
hand and eye, of voice and gesture, that make of love an art. In the
ordinary intimacies of marriage, the blunting intimacies of daily life,
she had no discrimination; Ishmael, had he been inclined to idealise
her, would not have been spared the realisation that even as the grosser
male she looked unbeautiful at times, needed to send clothes to the
wash, and was warned every few weeks, by an unbecoming limpness i