“We’re not always in a fog, you know,” said Giles. “And Aunt Bella is very keen on Smoke Abatement. Perhaps we’ll look happier some day.”
“I am very glad your family does not live in London,” said Alix. She felt more shy of Giles this morning, shut up with him in the intimacy of the chill, smoky carriage, than she had last night in the station dining-room. And it was as if she felt him more shy, too. They were making talk a little.
“Wouldn’t you have come, if we’d lived in London?” he inquired.
“Maman would have sent me just the same, I think,” said Alix. “She wanted me to know England. And your family, specially, of course. Captain Owen always said I must know his family.”
“Oh, yes. Of course,” said Giles. He got up then and looked at the heat regulator and said it was cold, did she mind? There seemed no heat. Then he sat down again and fell into a silence, his arms folded, his long legs stretched as best they could, before him, and they both, again, looked out of the window.
On it went, the dreadful city; but at last furtive squares and triangles of green were stealing into it and sparsely placed trees edged streets that adventured forth, at random, it seemed, to end, almost with a stare of forlorn astonishment, in fields ravaged of every trace of beauty. But the green spread and widened like a kindly tide, and though the brick and slate was encrusted at intervals, like an eruption, upon the land, there were copses and rises of meditative meadow and the white sky was melting here and there to a timid blue above little hamlets that seemed to have a heart and to be breathing with a life of their own. Beside a brook a girl was strolling with scarf and stick, two joyous dogs racing ahead of her; a cock-pheasant ran, startled, through a wood sprinkled with gold and russet, and presently there was a deeper echo of the blue overhead in the blue of quiet hills on the horizon.
“This is better, isn’t it?” said Giles, bringing his eyes to her at last. “Don’t you call this pretty?”
“Very pretty,” said Alix. And it was pretty, though to her eyes it was also insignificant and confused, its lack of design or purpose teasing her mind with its contradiction of the instinct for order and shapeliness that dwelt there. “Is it because of the season and your mistiness that everything seems very near one? The horizon is so near, and even the sky comes quite close down.”
“Like nice, kind arms, I always think,” said Giles. “No, even in the Lake Country, even in Scotland, we don’t get your splendid distances; or very rarely.”
“But it is very pretty,” Alix repeated. “I like the woods. Did you see the girl and the dogs a little while ago? I imagine that your sisters look like that.”