On Sundays, when Gregory could get away without too greatly disturbing the plan of life in which he had so long acquiesced, or too greatly disappointing Puck, they went for long walks in the country. Jean lied to Mary and to her mother about these walks. She wanted every scrap, even the knowledge of their existence, to herself. Sometimes, at the last moment a complication arose, impossible to overcome, and the walk was postponed. Neither Jean nor Gregory ever asked why or referred to it again. They accepted, without the indignity of complaint, the conditions of their loving.
Gregory was happy, too. And, although, unlike Jean, he never realized in his muscles the spiritual values of their love, he did feel that life was a bigger and deeper thing than he had ever dreamed. Margaret's well-meaning scratching at his interests no longer annoyed him. He felt that she had been cheated, made in one of the small molds, when there were so many larger ones in which she might have been shaped.
The day before New Year, Jean took the afternoon off and they went for a long tramp through the snow in Jersey. It was a glorious day with blue sky and sunshine, faintly warm on the hill crests. They walked until dusk and then had tea before a log fire in a little French roadhouse, where the fat wife of the proprietor insisted on Jean's taking off her shoes and putting on a pair of Gustave's red carpet slippers while the shoes dried.
Jean laughed. "I shall never understand why such a healthy-looking, able-to-manage-herself being gets so much mothering. Every night in winter I have to restrain mummy by force from feeling if my stockings are damp. I wish you knew mummy, Gregory. She's so impossible to describe, but she makes such ripping anecdotes."
"I do feel rather cheated, but I have a pretty clear conception. I think she's like this."
He drew a small shaft, firm at the base, tapering to a point.
"Mummy to the life," Jean chuckled. "Now do Mary."
"That's harder." The pencil poised over the paper some time before he made a line.
"There. That's as near as I can get, but I'm not sure that the proportions are right."
It looked like two triangles, one imposed on the other, apex to apex.