If it did, what did she want? As to one thing she had long been clear.
Jack Senhouse was a good lover, but would be an impossible mate. She had
found his gypsy tent and hedgerow practice in the highest degree romantic.
With gypsy practice he had the wheedling gypsy ways. An adventure of hers
in the North, for instance--when, panic-struck, she had fled to him by a
midnight train, had sought him through the dales and over limestone
mountains through a day and night, and cried herself to sleep, and been
found by him in the dewy dawn and soothed by his masterful cool sense--
wasn't this romantic? It had drawn her to him as she had never before been
drawn to a man. She felt that here at last was a man indeed to be trusted.
For she had been there with him, and not a living soul within miles,
entirely at his discretion, and he had not so much as kissed her fingers.
No, not even that, though he had wanted to. That she knew, as women do
know such things. Romantic, indeed, trustworthy! Why, a Bayard, a Galahad
of a gypsy! After this adventure, after he had driven her back to her
duty, she had owned allegiance to nobody else in the world. And when her
husband died she had renounced her widow-right, embraced hardship, kept
herself by teaching; and when, finally, he came to her and offered her her
choice, she had chosen Poverty for her lord as single-heartedly as ever
did Francis find his lady in a beggar's garb.

And that being done, it did not "do." That was how she put it now; but the
process had been slow, and never defined. He had carried her off to Baden
for his work of naturalising plants. He had a great name for that, a
European name. In three weeks his work absorbed him; within that time she
knew that she was no mate for him. You can't be picturesque for ever, she
thought. She had never reckoned with his incredible simplicity, and never
for a moment connected his talk with his acts. Perhaps this Jack was the
only really logical man in the world. Now she found that in talking of
Poverty as the only happiness, he literally and really believed it so. He