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Ross’s own sight of Elizabeth after six months had not been quite as casual or as unemotional as he had hoped and expected. He had hoped to find himself immune, as if his marriage and love for Demelza were the inoculation against some fever of the blood and that a deliberate contact on his part to prove the cure. But Demelza, he found, was not an inoculation, though she might be a separate fever. He wondered, just at that first greeting, whether after all Demelza’s impulse to refuse the invitation had not perhaps been wiser than his own.
One did not so much feel sorrow at his absence as a sense of the unfitness of his not being there.
“The family grows too intrusive for my taste. I prefer a community run on simpler lines.” “They’re the people of the future, Ross. Not the worn-out families like the Chynoweths and the Poldarks.” “It’s not their vigor I query but their use of it. If a man has vitality let him increase his own soul, not set about owning other people’s.”
“It is more than a little strange,” said Francis. “Philosophers would no doubt hang
some doxy name on it. But to me it seems just a plain perversity of life.” “What does?” “Oh…” The other hesitated. “I don’t know. We envy some other person for something he’s got and we have not, although in truth it may be that he really hasn’t it. Do I make myself clear? No, I thought not. Let’s go and see George.”
By them and by George Warleggan, who from his dress she felt must be at least the son of a lord, she was overawed. But she was learning fast that people, even well-bred people like those, had a surprising tendency to take you at your own valuation.
“Ah, your buts! You’ve no faith, Ross. You men don’t understand. You don’t know the teeniest thing about Verity! That you don’t.” “Do you?” “I don’t need to. I know myself.”
“So you’ll go to Falmouth an’ see?” she asked. “I’ll consider it,” said Ross. “I’ll consider it.” Having come that far, she was too wise to press further. Another and less elevated lesson she had learned in married life was that if she wheedled long enough and discreetly enough, she quite often got her own way in the end.
He thought, If we could only stop life for a while I would stop here. Not when I get home, not leaving Trenwith, but here, here reaching the top of the hill out of Sawle, dusk wiping out the edges of the land and Demelza walking and humming at my side. He knew of things plucking at his attention. All existence was a cycle of difficulties to be met and obstacles to be surmounted. But at that evening hour of Christmas Day 1787, he was not concerned with the future, only the present. He thought, I am not hungry or thirsty or lustful or envious; I am not perplexed or weary or ambitious or
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