He sat down beside her again with mixed feelings of constraint and gratification, and began, while their silence relaxed again, from an elert, constricting consciousness of each other’s proximity into benign and restful indifference, to kick with swinging heels the side of the rock.

22

Rather Afraid

UNWILLING TO GO farther, distrustful of himself and of the valley, Milton leant against a tree at the mouth of it and looked disparagingly up the river bed. He wished Sydney had not asked him to meet her here.

He had spent the morning writing to his brother and sister to tell them about his engagement, and it worried him that he had forgotten to post the letters and was still carrying them round in his pocket. He knew them to be lively and expressive and likely to do him credit on their arrival in England, having just enough manly glow about them and just enough boyish reticence. His flair for a right note was a perpetual temptation to cynicism, and his consciousness that these letters, so bound to strike a note of sincerity, were in intention sincere, and had been written face to face with himself with a zealous effort to avoid misrepresentation, did not make him any better at ease about them. He wondered if anyone ever tried to describe the experience of love without a bottomless suspicion of imposing upon themselves, of falsity. Momentous letters should be posted white-hot; they impinge too much on the memory, are weighed over and over again by the conscience. He felt an indecorum in going to meet Sydney with these in his pocket, these meanly adequate little summings-up of his position vis-à-vis with herself, his praises of her already qualified by a faint possessiveness. So at least he assured himself; it was a pretty enough scruple for a leisurely lover in this little world of suspended activity, where there was time for the finest of shades. But he pressed on it rather too eagerly. Deeper than this, beyond the domain of scruple, he was not at ease.