‘Everybody makes his own world, remember,’ he laughed, ‘and its size depends, I suppose, upon the power of the imagination.’
‘Then I fear one’s imagination is a very poor one,’ she said solemnly, ‘or else I have none at all. I cannot pretend to understand your tastes for trees and woods and things; but you’re exactly like poor Dick in that way, and I suppose one must be really clever to be like that.’
‘A year is a long time, Margaret,’ he said after a pause, to comfort her. ‘Much may happen before it’s over.’
‘I hope so,’ she had answered, standing behind his chair and stroking his head. ‘By that time you may have met some one who will reconcile you to—to staying here—a little longer.’ She patted his head as though he were a Newfoundland dog, he thought. It made him laugh.
‘Perhaps,’ he said.
And, now in his room, before the candles were lighted, he was standing by the open window, thinking it all over. Of women, of course, he knew little or nothing; to him they were all charming, some of them wonderful; and he was not conscious that his point of view might be considered by a man of the world—of the world that is little, sordid, matter-of-fact—distinctly humorous. At forty-five he believed in women just as he had believed in them at twenty, only more so, for nothing had ever entered his experience to trouble an exquisite picture in his mind. They stood nearer to God than men did, he felt, and the depravity of really bad women he explained by the fact that when they did fall they fell farther. The sex-fever, so far as he was concerned, had never mounted to his brain to obscure his vision.
He only knew—and knew it with a sacred wonder that was akin to worship—that women, like the angels, were beyond his reach and beyond his understanding. Comely they all were to him. He looked up to them in his thoughts, not for their reason or strength, but for the subtlety of their intuition, their power of sacrifice, and last but not least, for the beauty and grace of their mere presence in a world that was so often ugly and unclean.
‘The flame—the lamp—the glory—whatever it may be called—keeps alight in their faces,’ he loved to say to himself, ‘almost to the end. With men it is gone at thirty—often at twenty.’
And his sister, for all her light hold on life, and the strain in her that in his simplicity he regarded as rather ‘worldly,’ was no exception to the rule. He thought her entirely good and wonderful, and, perhaps, so far as she went, he was not too egregiously mistaken. He looked for the best in everybody, and so, of course, found it.
‘Only she will never make much of me, or I of her, I’m afraid,’ he thought as he leaned out of the window, watching the scented darkness. ‘We shall get along best by leaving each other alone and being affectionate, so to speak, from a distance.’