I sympathize with her. She got the precious James fair enough,
and the decent thing for you is to keep away."
"But I'm not decent either," Mariana continued. "If you could know what
is in my head you'd recognize that. I seem to have no good qualities. I
don't want them, Howat," her voice intensified; "I want Jim."
He was completely silenced by this desire persisting in spite of every
established obstacle. It summoned an increasing response at the core of
his being. Such an attitude was, more remotely, his own; but in him it
had been purely negative, an inhibition rather than a challenge; he had
kept out of life instead of actively defying it. In him the family
inheritance of blackness was subsiding with the rest.
Howat maintained until the moment of their departure his protest, his
perverse community with Harriet Polder. "You'll find a happy house," he
predicted, "and come home like a fool. I hope you do. It ought to help
make you more reasonable. She will tell James to give you a comfortable
chair, and apologize for not asking you to dinner." She gazed through
the car window without replying. He realized that he had never seen
Mariana more becomingly dressed--she wore a rough, silver-coloured suit
with a short jacket, a pale green straw hat, like the new willow leaves,
across the blueness of her eyes, and an innumerably ruffled and flounced
waist of thinnest batiste.
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