Before the Fact Read Free

men, she had despised most things except Lina McLaidlaw.
    By twenty-eight her views had very much changed.
    Bored at home, longing for escape, and yet never quite able to take the drastic step of leaving it on her own initiative, she had found that her values had been, for a woman, mistaken ones. Her mother’s firm ideas about feminine objectives, and still more her family’s outspoken comments, had had their effect. Lina, always impressionable, arrived at the other extreme. She came, quite imperceptibly, to despise her mind, which was very much above the feminine average, and embraced the idea that the only thing worth having for a woman was looks. Not being pretty she was therefore, as a woman, a failure.
    Indeed, not only did she now despise her brains: she often wished heartily that she had none.
    Intelligence, she had very soon discovered, was in her set the thing above all others which was not done. In a woman it amounted to the unforgivable crime. Kleptomania could always be excused; intelligence never. The rumour of her unfortunate brains frightened the young men away from Lina as effectually as if she had scared them off with a police rattle. The only times she had ever felt glad that she was not a complete fool were on her short and very occasional visits to Joyce, whose circle held to a table of values very different from that prevailing in Abbot Monckford; but she disliked Joyce’s literary young men so heartily that she might just as well have stayed at home.
    These families ...
    What her family had never troubled to tell Lina was that her face, if not conventionally pretty, was a hauntingly attractive one. Among our friends, even among our loves, there are very few faces which we can re-create before the eye of the mind in their fleshly absence. Lina’s was one of these.
    It was a very small face with, except for her mouth, small features: an elfish, puckish little face, which is rare among fair women. Her hair, which even her mother admitted to be a good point, was a pale, silvered gold, and her eyes a vivid blue with very long lashes, curling up at the tip. Her mouth was very red and was only thrown into prominence by the miniature effect of her other features. Her upper lip was short, and her chin very delicate and narrow, though only just holding its own against recession. She was not tall, and her undiluted Scottish ancestry had ensured that her bones, while fine, should be definite; it would have been an exaggeration to call her figure sturdy, but it was certainly not slight. Her hands were very small and very soft. She did not care for games and was no good at them, but she could walk most men off their feet.
    She came of a family of soldiers. Her father was the first McLaidlaw for heaven knew how many generations who had failed to produce a son for the army. Though a genial man, there were times when General McLaidlaw looked gloomily upon his two daughters. Lina knew and quite understood. She was no more of a snob than was good for her, but she was naïvely glad that she was descended in the direct line on her father’s side from Robert the Bruce. The fact would not, however, have deterred her from marrying a man, if she had been in love with him, before whom her parents would have thrown up their hands in horror.
    Women have not the class feeling of men. It is environment rather than instinct which sets their standard. A chorus girl who marries into the peerage can out-dowager any duchess, and a duke’s daughter can be, and frequently is, more vulgar than any shop assistant. If Lina had hesitated at all over an intimacy with a man whom her father would have called an outsider, it would have been only to make sure that there was enough in common between them to make marriage possible; that settled, she would have thought no more about it.
    For Lina now very much wanted to be married.
    She no longer despised men at all. She respected them profoundly.
    She was not happy, and she longed for happiness.