make love to her--and
certainly she didn't--she couldn't possibly love him as a girl ought to
love her prospective husband--as Beatrice, for instance, loved her young
parliamentarian. That seemed settled. And because she did think things
over, and was no longer very young indeed, she saw that the change of
circumstances in a girl's life when she was going to be married counted
for something, something of the pleasure, something of the excitement.
It was so with Beatrice, and with Muriel. They loved the men they were
going to marry, but they also got a great deal of satisfaction out of
the change in their surroundings, quite apart from that. What sort of
change would she have as Jim's wife? She would step straight out of one
large house into another, and she would no more be the mistress of
Mountfield than she had been of Kencote. So she told herself. For the
mistresses of houses like Kencote and Mountfield were really a sort of
superior housekeeper, allowed to live with the family, but placed where
they were with the sole object of serving their lords and masters, with
far less independence than a paid housekeeper, who could take her money
and go if she were dissatisfied with her position.

What a prospect! To live out the rest of her life in the subjection
against which she had already begun to rebel, in exactly similar
surroundings and in exactly the same atmosphere! If she married Jim she
would not even have the pleasure of furnishing her own house. It would
be Jim's house, and the furniture and all the appurtenances of it were
so perfect in Jim's eyes that she knew he would never hear of her
altering a thing. She would not be able to rearrange her drawing-room
without his permission. That was what it meant to marry a country
gentleman of Jim's sort, who disliked "gadding about," and would expect
his wife to go through the same dull round, day after day, all her life
long, while he amused himself in the way that best suited him.

When she had reached this point, and the end of her toilet together,
Cicely suddenly determined that she would _never_ marry Jim, and if he
pressed her she would tell him so. She didn't want to marry anybody. If
only she could get away from Kencote and be a hospital nurse, or
something of the sort, that was all she wanted. With this rather
unsatisfactory conclusion she cleared her mind, ran downstairs, and
found Jim himself alone in the drawing-room.

CHAPTER X

TOWN _versus_ COUNT