“What did you want to find?”
“I shan’t know until I have found it. I do want to go home now, but I am full of strange feelings about it. I feel as if I was bearing the mark of something that can’t be hidden or disguised of what my mother did, as if I were all a burning recollection for him that he couldn’t fail to see. He is good, a just man. He ... he is the best hurdle maker in three counties.”
While listening to this daughter of a man who made ladders the Honourable Gerald had been swiftly thinking of an intriguing phrase that leaped into his mind. Social plesiomorphism, that was it! Caste was humbug, no doubt, but even if it was conscious humbug it was there, really there, like the patterned frost upon a window pane, beautiful though a little incoherent, and conditioned only by the size and number of your windows. (Eighteen windows in that pub!) But what did it amount to, after all? It was stuck upon your clear polished outline for every eye to see, but within was something surprising as the sight of a badger in church—until you got used to the indubitable relation of such badgers to such churches. Fine turpitudes!
“My dear girl,” he burst out, “your mother and you were right, absolutely. I am sure life is enhanced not by amassing conventions, but by destroying them. And your feeling for your father is right, too, rightest of all. Tell me ... let me ... may I take you back to him?”
The girl’s eyes dwelt upon his with some intensity.
“Your courage is kind,” she said, “but he doesn’t know you, nor you him.” And to that she added, “You don’t even know me.”
“I have known you for ten thousand years. Come home to him with me, we will go back together. Yes, you can explain. Tell him”—the Honourable Gerald had got the bit between his teeth now—“tell him I’m your sweetheart, will you—will you?”
“Ten thousand ...! Yes, I know; but it’s strange to think you have only seen me just once before!”
“Does that matter? Everything grows from that one small moment into a world of ... well of ... boundless admiration.”
“I don’t want,” said Orianda, reopening her crimson parasol, “to grow into a world of any kind.”