CHAPTER XXXII
ON THE HILL
That afternoon Ernie and his father sauntered up to the chalk-pit, and lay on the green hill-side above it in the sun.
Ernie plucked the bents and chewed them.
"Dad," he began at last.
"Yes."
"What is love?"
Once years ago at a dance in Grosvenor Square, Edward Caspar had himself for a moment floated out on to the ocean of an immense and wonderful new life. Thereafter he had been captured, as such easy-going dreamy creatures are, by one of the fiercer sex. He respected his wife, admired her beauty, owed her much, and was aware of it; but for all her strength of character Anne had found herself from the start of her married relations with her husband in that position of secret moral inferiority which is even to-day, perhaps as the result of an age-long inheritance of tradition, the accustomed doom of the woman who has taken the initiative in matters of sex. Moreover as the years went by the doom grew always more oppressive, and her husband more remote....
Edward answered his son,
"A door opens," he said slowly. "And you see."
"What d'you see?" persisted the young man.