He found a beautiful cottage on the steep side of a hill, looking clean over the town, that lay in the bottom of the basin, and away at the old quarries on the opposite side of the space. Mrs. Forbes was in the garden. She was a tall woman with white hair. She came up the path taking off her thick gloves, laying down her shears. It was autumn. She wore a wide-brimmed hat.
Brangwen blushed to the roots of his hair, and did not know what to say.
"I thought I might look in," he said, "knowing you were friends of my brother's. I had to come to Wirksworth."
She saw at once that he was a Brangwen.
"Will you come in?" she said. "My father is lying down."
She took him into a drawing-room, full of books, with a piano and a violin-stand. And they talked, she simply and easily. She was full of dignity. The room was of a kind Brangwen had never known; the atmosphere seemed open and spacious, like a mountain-top to him.
"Does my brother like reading?" he asked.
"Some things. He has been reading Herbert Spencer. And we read Browning sometimes."
Brangwen was full of admiration, deep thrilling, almost reverential admiration. He looked at her with lit-up eyes when she said, "we read." At last he burst out, looking round the room:
"I didn't know our Alfred was this way inclined."
"He is quite an unusual man."
He looked at her in amazement. She evidently had a new idea of his brother: she evidently appreciated him. He looked again at the woman. She was about forty, straight, rather hard, a curious, separate creature. Himself, he was not in love with her, there was something chilling about her. But he was filled with boundless admiration.
At tea-time he was introduced to her father, an invalid who had to be helped about, but who was ruddy and well-favoured, with snowy hair and watery blue eyes, and a courtly naïve manner that again was new and strange to Brangwen, so suave, so merry, so innocent.
His brother was this woman's lover! It was too amazing. Brangwen went home despising himself for his own poor way of life. He was a clod-hopper and a boor, dull, stuck in the mud. More than ever he wanted to clamber out, to this visionary polite world.
He was well off. He was as well off as Alfred, who could not have above six hundred a year, all told. He himself made about four hundred, and could make more. His investments got better every day. Why did he not do something? His wife was a lady also.
But when he got to the Marsh, he realized how fixed everything was, how the other form of life was beyond him, and he regretted for the first time that he had succeeded to the farm. He felt a prisoner, sitting safe and easy and unadventurous. He might, with risk, have done more with himself. He could neither read Browning nor Herbert Spencer, nor have access to such a room as Mrs. Forbes's. All that form of life was outside him.
But then, he said he did not want it. The excitement of the visit began to pass off. The next day he was himself, and if he thought of the other woman, there was something about her and her place that he did not like, something cold, something alien, as if she were not a woman, but an inhuman being who used up human life for cold, unliving purposes.
The evening came on, he played with Anna, and then sat alone with his own wife. She was sewing. He sat very still, smoking, perturbed. He was aware of his wife's quiet figure, and quiet dark head bent over her needle. It was too quiet for him. It was too peaceful. He wanted to smash the walls down, and let the night in, so that his wife should not be so secure and quiet, sitting there. He wished the air were not so close and narrow. His wife was obliterated from him, she was in her own world, quiet, secure, unnoticed, unnoticing. He was shut down by her.
He rose to go out. He could not sit still any longer. He must get out of this oppressive, shut-down, woman-haunt.
His wife lifted her head and looked at him.
"Are you going out?" she asked.
He looked down and met her eyes. They were darker than darkness, and gave deeper space. He felt himself retreating before her, defensive, whilst her eyes followed and tracked him down.
"I was just going up to Cossethay," he said.
She remained watching him.
"Why do you go?" she said.
His heart beat fast, and he sat down, slowly.
"No reason particular," he said, beginning to fill his pipe again, mechanically.
"Why do you go away so often?" she said.
"But you don't want me," he replied.
She was silent for a while.
"You do not want to be with me any more," she said.
It startled him. How did she know this truth? He thought it was his secret.
"Yi," he said.
"You want to find something else," she said.
He did not answer. "Did he?" he asked himself.
"You should not want so much attention," she said. "You are not a baby."
"I'm not grumbling," he said. Yet he knew he was.
"You think you have not enough," she said.
"How enough?"
"You think you have not enough in me. But how do you know me? What do you do to make me love you?"
He was flabbergasted.
"I never said I hadn't enough in you," he replied. "I didn't know you wanted making to love me. What do you want?"
"You don't make it good between us any more, you are not interested. You do not make me want you."
"And you don't make me want you, do you now?" There was a silence. They were such strangers.
"Would you like to have another woman?" she asked.
His eyes grew round, he did not know where he was. How could she, his own wife, say such a thing? But she sat there, small and foreign and separate. It dawned upon him she did not consider herself his wife, except in so far as they agreed. She did not feel she had married him. At any rate, she was willing to allow he might want another woman. A gap, a space opened before him.
"No," he said slowly. "What other woman should I want?"
"Like your brother," she said.
He was silent for some time, ashamed also.
"What of her?" he said. "I didn't like the woman."
"Yes, you liked her," she answered persistently.
He stared in wonder at his own wife as she told him his own heart so callously. And he was indignant. What right had she to sit there telling him these things? She was his wife, what right had she to speak to him like this, as if she were a stranger.
"I didn't," he said. "I want no woman."
"Yes, you would like to be like Alfred."
His silence was one of angry frustration. He was astonished. He had told her of his visit to Wirksworth, but briefly, without interest, he thought.
As she sat with her strange dark face turned towards him, her eyes watched him, inscrutable, casting him up. He began to oppose her. She was again the active unknown facing him. Must he admit her? He resisted involuntarily.
"Why should you want to find a woman who is more to you than me?" she said.
The turbulence raged in his breast.
"I don't," he said.
"Why do you?" she repeated. "Why do you want to deny me?"
Suddenly, in a flash, he saw she might be lonely,