“As different as that?” Toppie questioned, and with the faintest flavour of distress in the question. “Owen always wrote as if she were lovely, too.”
“Oh, as far as that goes she’s lovelier, I suppose. Where Alix is like a crystal she is like a flower. And they both have that dignity and security, you know. Alix is such a dignified little creature, isn’t she?”
“Yes. Beautifully dignified; beautifully secure. I always feel of Alix that she would be safe, always and everywhere. Yes; those are just the words for Alix.”
“And it’s not exactly righteousness, is it?” Giles went on, finding more words since Toppie liked these ones. “It’s integrity. Like a little noble Roman girl.”
“Integrity. Yes.” Toppie mused on Alix. But then, alas, she came back to Alix’s mother. “The same in loveliness; the same in dignity and security.—In what ways different, then, Giles?”
He knew that there was hardly anything he could say of madame Vervier that it would not be unwise to say. He watched an ant, disturbed by his change of posture, thread its anxious way amongst the tufts of heather and felt that he was like the ant. He, too, must go forward and find the path that promised most safety. “Well, she’s more impulsive, I feel; more selfish; less fastidious.”
Toppie, for a moment, reflected in silence. He saw her dimly, sitting there beside him, a grey silhouette against the sky. “Less fastidious?” she then said, and it was as if he had presented her with an object that she turned reluctantly, and with surprise, in her hands: “How strange. Owen gave me no impression of that. He gave me the impression of someone quite finished, quite exquisite; in every way. How do you mean less fastidious?”
“Oh, I don’t exactly know,” said Giles, and he feared it was uneasily. “Merely in the sense, perhaps, that she’d put up with all sorts of queer people, for the sake of not being bored, that Alix wouldn’t care to have. She is exquisite; very exquisite.”
“You did like her, didn’t you, Giles? Very, very much?”
“Well, hardly very, very,” he qualified, pausing with wary antennæ, as it were. “She’s not my sort, really. That’s all that it comes to.”