These Delights Read Free Page A

weather-beaten wicker one and filled a pipe.
    He glanced at her a little curiously once or twice without speaking, then, when his pipe was going well he asked gently:
    “Why don’t you want the children to come here, Diana?”
    She moved impatiently.
    “It’s hardly that,” she said. “After all, I won’t have to look after them. It’s just that —”
    “It’s just that for some unexplained reason you don’t want them.”
    She was restless, getting up and leaning against one of the stone pillars of the loggia as far from him as she could get.
    “All right, I’ll be honest. I don’t want them,” she said. “They’ll be underfoot eve r y time I come here. They’ll take up your spare time, and I’ll hardly ever see you alone.”
    “Darling, I won’t let them interfere with us,” he told her. “They’ll be off on their own for the most part if the weather is fine, and after all, it’s only for the summer.”
    “Supposing,” she said slowly, “that I had agreed to marry you quickly, what would have happened then? You surely wouldn’t have expected me to look after a pack of children immediately I returned from my honeymoon?”
    “Of course not,” he said quietly. “That would have been up to you to decide. But the question didn’t arise, did it?”
    She brushed this aside, fastening only on her grievance. “You mean if we were going to be married this summer, and I had agreed, you wouldn’t have minded having three noisy children to share the first weeks of our married life?”
    His eyes suddenly twinkled.
    “You make it sound very formidable. We don’t even know if they are noisy.”
    “All children are noisy,” she said impatiently. “But you haven’t answered me. Wouldn’t you have minded?”
    “No, I don’t think so, as a temporary arrangement,” he said.
    His eyes became abstracted and he had the uneasy feeling that he should mind. Marriage, especially to Diana, meant a certain amount of readjustment, and three strangers, however self-effacing, would scarcely assist the process.
    He was about to qualify his last remark when she spoke quickly and angrily.
    “Sometimes I don’t understand you at all,” she said. “You seem so — s o indifferent and unenterprising about the things that matter, and so stupidly stubborn about the things that don’t.”
    “Yes, I’m afraid you must find me very unsatisfactory,” he replied. “I wonder why you want to marry me.”
    “Because—oh, Luke, you can be the most irritating man I know!” She sounded perilously near to tears and he glanced at her curiously. He had never known her cry. “I want to marry you for the same reason you want to marry me, I suppose. Because we’re fond of one another—well, love one another, if you like. I’m not good at expressing my emotions, but then, neither are you.”
    “You don’t always give me much opportunity,” he said a little wryly. “I think you’re frightened of emotion, and that’s half your trouble, Diana.”
    She stared at him resentfully.
    “You know very well that we are neither of us emotional kind of people. That’s way—that’s why I can bear being engaged to you.”
    “Only can bear it?” One eyebrow lifted quizzically.
    “I don’t mean it like that . You know very well what I mean, the kind of person I am.”
    “Not always. And I sometimes think you have no idea of the kind of person I am. Darling, I think we’re almost quarrelling.”
    “I don’t want to quarrel,” she cried. “I only want you to see things in a reasonable light—to understand the things that matter and the thi ngs that don’t.”
    He changed his position slightly, and the chair creaked wheezily as he moved.
    “But I find that the question of the children is important,” he said, “just as the question of you not spending money on the farm until you part-own it is important to me. In the children’s case, I could hardly refuse if I wished. They have no mother, very little money, and a