It was a comfort to him that he could admire her. She touched nothing but she gave it charm. She changed the Mapledom of their room to an originality of elegance. Her ingenuity and adroitness with herself were a source of amusement and amazement to him. The fun of watching a woman in all her ways! Her modesties, her coquetries, her absorption in the effect she is going to produce though it be only on an old fisherman on the quay! Her deceptions and comedies, her ruses, her choice of mood, her skill in calling forth the complementary mood in her companion! With Linda René took particular delight in her wit, her pleasantly malicious comment on the persons of their world. Sometimes she would bring out in her talk of them qualities and foibles that he had not remarked, though on her indication he was forced to admit that they were surprisingly there. Other times she seemed to shape them to fit in with a fantastic world of her own. And that would be little less amusing than her criticisms. He could admire her, but his admiration made him feel how remote she was, how unpossessed, how little he desired possession, and how, in all things, she invited to it.
Perhaps she felt some of his uneasiness, for she said toward the end of their stay:
"I suppose a honeymoon can never be the same to a man as it is to a woman." (The hypothetical man and woman of all her arguments.) "A man must have his work."
"I've been thinking," said René, "that we never know what we want but when we have it."
"How true!" She had a way of making agreement with him a sort of flattery, than which he found little more distasteful.
And as they drove to the station she looked round at the hills and the rocky coast-line, and murmured:
"It will be something to remember. It _is_ a pretty place."
For him it had a beauty that had stirred him like nothing else he had ever known. For him also, till now, all things had been charming, but the desolate moors, the stubborn cliffs had led him away from charm to beauty and the savage joy of living in resistance.
The return to their world shocked him. From those weeks of the profoundest emotions that had ever shaken him to come back to amiable superficial relationships left him floundering, made him, when he had collected himself, feel how utterly dependent he was upon his wife. He was committed to her, isolated with her. The loneliness of that day upon Ravenscar was nothing to the loneliness in the multitude.