“What appeals to me is to be established,” said Alix. “I do not care for babies; but they are a part of marriage, and no doubt one would come to like them when one had them. As for the socks—I should hope to marry well enough to have a maid to do that.”
Rosemary’s eyes rounded. “You mean you’d marry for money?”
Alix smiled: “You are so réaliste in some ways, Rosemary, and so romantic in others.”
“I hope, dear, you’d never think of marrying for money,” Mrs. Bradley put in. “Money is a very minor consideration in marriage.”
“Romantic! I romantic!—It’s merely a question of one’s own dignity!” cried Rosemary; while Alix said: “There would have to be character and taste and position as well;—but don’t you think, chère Madame, that it is well to marry suitably?”
“Suitably? Yes, of course.” Mrs. Bradley was gently bewildered. “But the most suitable thing of all is to marry someone one loves.”
Alix, in silence, wondered.
Mr. Westmacott seemed a little better now. She went to the Rectory twice a week and read aloud in French to him and Toppie. He seemed to enjoy it and followed if she read very slowly and distinctly. Toppie sat, her fair head bent over her knitting. She was knitting endless little vests for the poor babies of one of Mrs. Bradley’s charities. Alix wondered sometimes what was to become of all those babies. Were they passed on from Mrs. Bradley to more Mrs. Bradleys, until, at last, in one of the hospitals administered by the Aunt Bellas, they closed their eyes? Would some be good citizens and some mere beasts of burden, and some, perhaps, thieves and scoundrels? All were to begin with those little snowy woollen vests, and all were to end in coffins. It made her feel strange to think of it. But when she expressed something of these thoughts to Toppie one day, Toppie looked at her very gravely, and said: “They are all to end in heaven, Alix. We are all of us only that; souls setting out on our journey.” But Alix found it so difficult to think of some people as souls.
The babies’ vests were a strange accompaniment to Saint-Simon’s “Mémoires.” She found these on Giles’s shelves and asked Toppie if they would do. She had so often heard André de Valenbois and monsieur de Maubert and Maman quote Saint-Simon. Neither Toppie nor her father had read him and were quite contented with her choice, and she skipped about and found the people who most interested her. The French was strange, but it seemed to say more than modern French. The strangeness, she saw, was not apparent to Toppie and her father, nor was the acid irony nor the often unconscious humour. Toppie and her father rarely found anything to laugh at. Mr. Westmacott’s chief preoccupation was to follow the relationships of the characters and to place them correctly against the background of contemporaneous history, and for this purpose there were many interruptions while Toppie went to fetch the encyclopædia. Alix saw that Toppie sometimes listened with a vague distress. Saint-Simon and the people he wrote of were as alien to her understanding—to say nothing of her sympathies—as the Chinese. To Alix, for all the travesty of their tails and crests, they were clearly recognizable types. She saw the court of Louis Quatorze as a great golden aviary where splendid creatures, plumed, absurd, and beautiful, paced and preened and surreptitiously pecked at each other beneath the proud gaze of the monstrous bird of paradise on the throne. There was something sinister about them, there behind their bars; but something familiar and lovable too. Toppie only saw them as the denizens of a rather disagreeable fairy-tale, though at some moments of the recital, obscure to Alix, she saw that Toppie’s eyes rested upon her in a cogitativeness that seemed aware of too much reality. “They are all odious people, Alix,” she said to her one day. “Odious; vindictive; vulgar and wicked.”