Before the Fact Read Online Free PDF Page B

the immensity of the trouble that overshadowed them both, or else was inclined to laugh it away, which Lina could not bear.
    In the same way she was secretly a good deal upset by Johnnie’s proficiency in his love-making. She told herself, and she had told Johnnie too, that it did not matter to her in the least what he had done before he met her. But it did matter. She found herself jealous, sometimes bitterly jealous, of all the women Johnnie had loved before he loved her.
    “I’m being ridiculous,” she told herself, with tears in her eyes. “It’s a fatal mistake to be proprietary. I won’t be proprietary.”
    But she was proprietary. She felt proprietary. Johnnie was hers now, as she was his; and she wished fervently that he could have come to her clean, as she had to him. And yet all the time she could not help thinking how wonderful it was of him to have had so much success and experience.
    Johnnie thought so too.
    On the whole, however, Lina enjoyed her honeymoon.
    Of one thing it was impossible to accuse Johnnie, and that was niggardliness. He spent with an unconscious prodigality that left Lina quite aghast.
    It was Johnnie’s instinct, as it was his upbringing, to go only to the most expensive restaurants and hotels, as it was his instinct to order the most expensive dishes and wines when he got there. He probably did not realize it, but to Lina he seemed to take it for granted that the most expensive things had been prepared for him personally, and it simply never occurred to him to put up with the second best.
    In the same way nothing was too good for Johnnie’s wife. A sheaf of fresh flowers arrived every morning at their suite for her; she had only to mention the most passing wish for a thing and the thing was hers at the first opportunity. Lina, whose own tastes were simple, did not know whether to cry over Johnnie’s extravagance, or smile at the unconscious arrogance that prompted it. Johnnie seemed more boyish to her than ever in his prodigality.
    She remonstrated with him continually, but he only laughed and called her a little provincial; and Lina, who was very conscious of her provincialism in Johnnie’s presence, had to laugh too. Johnnie could always make her laugh. That, Lina knew, is the greatest bond of all between two people, to be ready to laugh at the same things. And they did laugh, enormously. Lina told Johnnie that he had laughed his way through their honeymoon from beginning to end; as indeed he did, and sometimes in the wrong places.
    Once or twice Lina did persuade him to let her take him to some unpretentious little restaurant on the left bank that she remembered from her schooldays, where, in her own private opinion, the food was just as good as in the expensive places and just about ten times less in price; but Johnnie never seemed at home there. In return Johnnie taught her a great deal about drink. Lina thought she drank more on her honeymoon than in all her life before. Sometimes, too, she felt she needed it.
    In public, to Lina’s delight, he was just as attentive and affectionate to her as in private. Any qualms Lina had felt by her wedding day that Johnnie might not be really in love with her, vanished before this open love-making, so Johnnie-like and so un-English. Obviously he adored her, and did not mind the world knowing so. Lina felt little curls of joy twisting through her body when he took her hand across a restaurant table and kissed it right under the waiter’s nose. Nobody but Johnnie could have done a thing like that.
    Already he had a pet name for her. “Monkeyface,” he called her sometimes, because he said that when she was eating she made faces exactly like a monkey; and he would always sit on the opposite side of the table so that he could watch her and crow with delight.
    “Your little jaw pounces on every mouthful as if it hadn’t seen food for a week. Do you know you eat in little snaps? You do. You funny little monkeyface!”
    “My family used to