“I hope now I have made the plunge you will let me come over here sometimes,” he said; “somehow I think we are going to be friends.”
“I think we are friends already,” she said, smiling, “and I am very glad. One or two of the neighbours have called and asked me to tea parties. But I have lived such a different life. Except for those who farm or garden we haven’t much in common.”
“You have always lived on the land?” he asked.
“Oh no!” she laughed, looking at him with amusement. “I lived all my life until I was seventeen at Parson’s Green, and after that in a little street at the back of Tottenham Court Road, until the outbreak of war. And then I was for four years in Belgium and Northern France, cooking.”
“Good heavens! And all the time this was what you wanted!”
“Yes, this was what I wanted. I didn’t know. But this was it. And think of the luck of getting it!” She looked at him triumphantly. “The amazing wonderful luck! I feel as if I ought to be on my knees, figuratively, all the time, giving thanks.”
“Of course,” said Roger North slowly. “That is your mental attitude. No wonder you are so unusual a person. And how about the years that have gone before?”
“I sometimes wonder,” she said, thinking, “since I have come here of course, whether every part of our lives isn’t arranged definitely, with a purpose, to prepare us for the next part. It would help a bit through the bad times as well as the good, if one knew it was so, don’t you think?”
“I daresay,” Roger North answered vaguely, as was his fashion, Ruth soon discovered, if questioned on such things. “I wish you would tell me something of yourself. What line you came up along would really interest me quite a lot. And it isn’t idle curiosity either.”
There was a little silence.