Page:Wildwildheart00reesiala.pdf/118

she recognized it honestly for what it was—something entirely physical, springing from sex interest, without affection or regard. That certainly wasn’t love, though she shrewdly suspected it was what hurried many young couples into wedlock, often with the most disastrous results. No, she wasn’t likely to marry Gerald Waring, even if he lost his head completely enough to want her to do so.

But if Rodney Marsh were to ask her to be his wife? She turned away from this question when it presented itself to her. Sometimes she saw herself settled in the homestead of a little farm, an ideally happy wife. That was one picture. Was it a true one? Wasn’t there one more real and by no means so pleasant? A girl accustomed to a certain standard of living—of culture—married to a half-educated working man; entertaining his friends—the blacksmith and the plowboy, and the riff-raff from the “pub”?

Why see these pictures at all? Rodney had no more thought of her as a wife than he had of Emily Pratt, the little housemaid. Less, perhaps; for all she knew he might have found Emily quite attractive. Was Rodney right? Were women’s thoughts almost exclusively occupied with love and marriage? Certainly not! Ann, with a sudden fierceness, attacked the hats she was trimming for the little girls, stabbing them with pins.

The Coast team for the polo tournament, held at Wairiri in Christmas week, had now been chosen: Holmes, Waring, Marsh, and Kent, with Ralston as emergency man.

Rodney, accompanied by two grooms, was to make