“They are both Pyms!” he said, quite irritably. “You have evidently no eye for likenesses. Of course, there are dark Pyms and fair Pyms. The fair Pyms are upstairs in a corridor.”
“Women,” said the fair Lilia explanatorily to me. “Papa dislikes women so much, he won’t have their portraits about him.”
I had been on the point of calling the child Lady Pym, and she was his daughter! Fool that I had been!
“Because they simper and attitudinise,” said Sir Roderick. “If they behaved as sensibly as men I should like them as well.”
“That’s not saying very much,” said Lilia, with an amused look at me. “Papa is not enamoured of his fellow-men.”
“Do you want me to be hail-fellow well-met with Tom, Dick, and Harry?” he said, frowning at the daughter who was so unlike him that I began to think more charitably of my mistake.
“You know I don’t. I like you just as you are!” said his daughter, looking adorable with an infantine smile of love and trust brightening her sweet face.
It was like a personal sunshine. I felt it so, later, when she deigned to shine upon me; and every time it humbled me, and made me feel coarse, clumsy, unworthy, a very clod; and now it, or the memory of it, comes back here—it shines suddenly upon a poor sufferer’s face upon the pillow, and the patient vanishes and I see Lilia.
This won’t do. I must return to my statement.
After luncheon, Sir Roderick sent me out into the grounds with his daughter. From first to last he purposely threw us together. What his motive was I cannot imagine. Motive he has: I have seen enough to know that he never acts without one.