“Who?”
It was an adventure to her to put direct questions and get plain answers. She knew she might do it with this man.
“Why, he is a clergyman too—he is my guardian—one of them.”
Ursula knew that Skrebensky was an orphan.
“Where is really your home now?” she asked.
“My home?—I wonder. I am very fond of my colonel—Colonel Hepburn: then there are my aunts: but my real home, I suppose, is the army.”
“Do you like being on your own?”
His clear, greenish-grey eyes rested on her a moment, and, as he considered, he did not see her.
“I suppose so,” he said. “You see my father—well, he was never acclimatised here. He wanted—I don’t know what he wanted—but it was a strain. And my mother—I always knew she was too good to me. I could feel her being too good to me—my mother! Then I went away to school so early. And I must say, the outside world was always more naturally a home to me than the vicarage—I don’t know why.”
“Do you feel like a bird blown out of its own latitude?” she asked, using a phrase she had met.
“No, no. I find everything very much as I like it.”
He seemed more and more to give her a sense of the vast world, a sense of distances and large masses of humanity. It drew her as a scent draws a bee from afar. But also it hurt her.
It was summer, and she wore cotton frocks. The third time he saw her she had on a dress with fine blue-and-white stripes, with a white collar, and a large white hat. It suited her golden, warm complexion.
“I like you best in that dress,” he said, standing with his head slightly on one side, and appreciating her in a perceiving, critical fashion.
She was thrilled with a new life. For the first time she was in love with a vision of herself: she saw as it were a fine little reflection of herself in his eyes. And she must act up to this: she must be beautiful. Her thoughts turned swiftly to clothes, her passion was to make a beautiful appearance. Her family looked on in amazement at the sudden transformation of Ursula. She became elegant, really elegant, in figured cotton frocks she made for herself, and hats she bent to her fancy. An inspiration was upon her.
He sat with a sort of languor in her grandmother’s rockingchair, rocking slowly, languidly, backward and forward, as Ursula talked to him.
“You are not poor, are you?” she said.
“Poor in money? I have about a hundred and fifty a year of my own—so I am poor or rich, as you like. I am poor enough, in fact.”
“But you will earn money?”
“I shall have my pay—I have my pay now. I’ve got my commission. That is another hundred and fifty.”
“You will have more, though?”