Suffering always from the guilty consciousness of having no love for
him, and ever more and more from her sense that, instead of saving
him she was, as it were, pushing him down-hill--ironical nemesis for
vanity!--Gyp was ever more and more compliant to his whims, trying to
make up. But this compliance, when all the time she felt further and
further away, was straining her to breaking-point. Hers was a nature
that goes on passively enduring till something snaps; after that--no
more.
Those months of spring and summer were like a long spell of drought,
when moisture gathers far away, coming nearer, nearer, till, at last,
the deluge bursts and sweeps the garden.
XV
The tenth of July that year was as the first day of summer. There had
been much fine weather, but always easterly or northerly; now, after a
broken, rainy fortnight, the sun had come in full summer warmth with
a gentle breeze, drifting here and there scent of the opening lime
blossom. In the garden, under the trees at the far end, Betty sewed at a
garment, and the baby in her perambulator had her seventh morning sleep.
Gyp stood before a bed of pansies and sweet peas. How monkeyish the
pansies' faces! The sweet peas, too, were like tiny bright birds
fastened to green perches swaying with the wind. And their little green
tridents, growing out from the queer, flat stems, resembled the antennae
of insects.
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