"You're very hard, father," she said simply.
"The ways of the transgressors are hard," he replied, pointing still towards the gate. "If you'd come here in shame and humiliation, if you'd come here as one as had learnt the truth, you'd have found me all that you sought. But you come here a very ignorant woman, Marcia, and you leave me a little harder than ever before, and you leave the curses that choke my throat a little hotter, a little more murderous."
His clenched fist was pointing towards Mandeleys, his face was like granite. Marcia turned and left him without a word, opened the gate, walked across the little strip of turf, and half shrank from, half clung to the hand which helped her up into the car.
"Get away quickly, please," she implored him. "Don't talk to me, James. Outside the gates as quickly as you can go!"
He started his engine, and they drove off, through the lodge gates into the country lane, where the hedges were beautiful with fresh green foliage and fragrant with early honeysuckle.
"To London," she begged. "Don't stop—anywhere yet."
He nodded and drove a little faster, his eyes always upon the road. It was not until they had reached the heath country and the great open spaces around Newmarket that a little colour came back into her cheeks.
"It wasn't a success, James," she said quietly.
"I was afraid it mightn't be," he admitted.
"Nothing but a Drury Lane heroine would have moved him," she went on, with an uneasy little laugh. "If I could have gone back in rags, in a snowstorm, with a child in my arms, he'd have forgiven me. As I am now, I am an offence to all that he holds right, and his ideas are like steel cables—you can't twist or bend them."
Borden nodded. He relaxed his speed a little and glanced towards his companion.
"You know what our friend said in that Russian manuscript I lent you," he reminded her: "'The primitive laws are for the primitive world.'"
"But what do we learn, Jim?" she asked him tremulously. "What is its value? Is it sophistry or knowledge? I lived in that little cottage once. I have smiled at the memory of those days so often. I did homely tasks and dreamed of books and learning. To me it seems, although my fingers are bleeding, that I have climbed. And to him—and he looked just like something out of the Bible, Jim—I am nothing more—"
"Don't," he interrupted. "He is of his world and you of yours. You can't work out the sum you are trying to solve, there isn't any common denominator."
"I don't know," she answered, a little pitifully. "There was a single second, as I saw him sitting there with his Bible on his knee and remembered that he was a clean, well-living, honest man, when my heart began to shake. I remembered that he was my father. It seems to me that it is all wrong that there should be any difference between us. I suddenly felt that a brain really didn't count for anything, after all, that all the culture in the world wasn't so beautiful as a single right feeling."
He slackened again the speed of the car. As far as they could see was a great open space of moorland, with flaming bushes of yellow gorse, little clumps of early heather, and, in the distance, a streak of blue from the undergrowth of a long belt of firs. She looked about her for a moment and closed her eyes.
"There," he said, "is one of the simplest phases of beauty, the world has ever given us—flowers and trees, an open space and a west wind. There isn't any one who can look at these things and be happy who isn't somewhere near the right path, Marcia."
She leaned back, her eyes fixed dreamily upon the blue distance.
"Just drive on, please, Jim," she begged.