“Don’t laugh like that,” she said. “It’s rather stupid.”
“You’re perfectly right,” said Gumbril. “It is.”
And how did she spend her time? He continued the exploration.
Well, she read a lot of books; but most of the novels she got from Boots’ seemed to her rather silly.
“Too much about the same thing. Always love.”
The Complete Man gave a shrug. “Such is life.”
“Well, it oughtn’t to be,” said Emily.
And then, when she was in the country—and she was often in the country, taking lodgings here and there in little villages, weeks and months at a time—she went for long walks. Molly couldn’t understand why she liked the country; but she did. She was very fond of flowers. She liked them more than people, she thought.
“I wish I could paint,” she said. “If I could, I’d be happy for ever, just painting flowers. But I can’t paint.” She shook her head. “I’ve tried so often. Such dirty, ugly smudges come out on the paper; and it’s all so lovely in my head, so lovely out in the fields.”
Gumbril began talking with erudition about the flora of West Surrey: where you could find butterfly orchis and green man and the bee, the wood where there was actually wild columbine growing, the best localities for butcher’s broom, the outcrops of clay where you get wild daffodils. All this odd knowledge came spouting up into his mind from some underground source of memory. Flowers—he never thought about flowers nowadays from one year’s end to the other. But his mother had liked flowers. Every spring and summer they used to go down to stay at their cottage in the country. All their walks, all their drives in the governess cart had been hunts after flowers. And naturally the child had hunted with all his mother’s ardour. He had kept books of pressed flowers, he had mummified them in hot sand, he had drawn maps of the country and coloured them elaborately with different coloured inks to show where the different flowers grew. How long ago all that was! Horribly long ago! Many seeds had fallen in the stony places of his spirit, to spring luxuriantly up into stalky plants and wither again because they had no deepness of earth; many had been sown there and had died, since his mother scattered the seeds of the wild flowers.