She rather liked his teasing. The interests they shared were uncommonly small, perhaps, and the coinage of available words still smaller. Yet their differences never took on the slightest ‘edge.’ A genuine affection smoothed all their little talks.
‘You do read such funny old books, Paul,’ she observed, as though somewhere in her heart lurked a vague desire to make him more modern. ‘Don’t you ever try books of the day—novels, for instance?’ She had one under her arm at the moment. He took it to carry for her.
‘I have tried,’ he admitted, a little ashamed of his backwardness, ‘but I never can make out what they’re driving at—half the time. What they described has never happened to me, or come into my world. I don’t recognise it all as true, I mean—’ He stopped abruptly for fear he might say something to wound her.
‘One can always learn, though, and widen one’s world, can’t one? After all, we are all in the same world, aren’t we?’
He realised the impossibility of correcting her; the invitation to be sententious could not catch him; his nature was too profound to contain the prig.
‘Are we?’ he said gently.
‘Oh, I think so—more or less, Paul. There’s only one nice world, at least.’ She arranged her hat and parasol to keep the sun off, for she was afraid of the sun, even the shy sun of England.
He pulled out the deck-chair for her, and opened it.
‘Here,’ she said pointing, ‘if you don’t mind, dear; or perhaps over there where it looks drier; or just there under that tree, perhaps, is better still. It’s more sheltered, and there’s less sun, isn’t there?’
‘I think there is, yes,’ he replied, obeying her. The phrase ‘there’s less sun’ seemed to him so neatly descriptive of the mental state of persons without imagination.