'The money lasted uncommonly well,' said Mrs. Wimble when they spoke of it; 'it was a pity we didn't keep over a little, wasn't it?' There was a hint of asperity in the droop of her lips.
'We should have it now if we had,' he answered vaguely but with patience. 'But for me it's a memory that will always live.' He spoke with longing tenderness.
'What?' said Mrs. Wimble, who, like all slow thinkers, liked sentences repeated, thus giving time to find an intelligent reply.
'We had a lovely time out there,' she admitted with a sigh, and went on to mention by way of complaint that she feared she was getting rather stout in London. There was no idea in her that she had changed in any other way; she looked back upon Algeria as a kind of youthful madness, half regretting it. That the bird had flown from her heart did not occur to her. Not alone her body, but her mind was getting stout. She had grown so artificial that she was no longer real. The manners, moods, the words and gestures she adopted in order to please or in order to appear as others are, had ended by effectually screening her own natural self, that which is every one's possession of unique value. It was not so much that she was false as that she was not herself. She was unreal.
In Wimble, however, those two years remained as something bewilderingly beautiful. Just out of sight in his heart he wore still the steady glow of it. He never could recall quite what he had felt in those deliriously happy days, yet the knowledge that they had been deliriously happy remained and warmed his blood. It was a big, brave, heartening memory beneath his coloured waistcoat. He dreamed his dream, only he did not tell it to any one—yet. He remained a kind, untidy husband and father. But that was the outer portion of him. The inner portion flew and soared and even sang. He no longer quite understood the meaning of this inner portion, but some day, he felt, it would be drawn out of him again and recognised. He would be taught to realise it, and what this bird-thing in him meant would be made clear. Already he looked to little Joan with something more than an infatuated father's adoration for her yellow hair, her bright blue eyes, her light and dancing ways. Tom he just loved in the way his mother loved. He remained a rabbit with distinctive tendencies of the animal. But with Joan it was different. In Joan there was something he looked forward to. Even at the age of five there was a glint about her that increased the glow in him; at ten it was still more marked. She puzzled her mother considerably, just as later she alarmed her. 'I'm nervous about the child; she doesn't seem like other girls of her age. I don't see her getting on much,' was her opinion, expressed again and again in the same or similar language. 'Joan seems to me backward.'
'Well,' admitted her husband, 'she's certainly not in a hurry about it. She's maturing slowly. Lots of them do—when there's a good deal to mature.'
'I hope you're right, Joe.' And then she added with pride by way of compensation—'Tom's coming along nicely, anyhow,'—as though she spoke of a growing vegetable or, as he thought, of a rabbit in a cage with lettuces in front of it, and the idea of mating the chief end in life.
Once past the age of sixteen, however, Joan too came along nicely, and with a sudden rush that reminded her father of a young bird consciously leaving the nest. She seemed to mature so abruptly. There came a wondrous bloom upon her, as though the South poured up and blossomed in her body, mind, and soul. It took her father deliciously by surprise. The glowing thing in him spread too, rose to the surface, caught fire. He watched her with amazement, joy, and pride. He felt wings inside him. Thought danced—flashed against a background of blue and gold again.
'She'll do something in the world before she's done,' he said confusedly to himself, feeling a prophecy he had always made without realising it. 'There's wings in the girl. She'll teach them how to fly!'
He was beginning to realise himself—through her. His early ideal had taken flesh again, but this time with a difference. He had not merely found it. He had created it.