“Oh; but not all, Toppie. Some are very good, like Fénélon—though Saint-Simon is unfair to him; and some are charming, like the Duchess de Bourgogne. She was too fond of pleasure, perhaps; but she is so merry and amusing that one can forgive her that.”
“Very much too fond, I am afraid,” said Toppie, colouring above her knitting. “I do not like her, Alix.”
“If you feel the book unsuitable for our young friend, Toppie,” Mr. Westmacott observed, “why should we not read ‘Corinne’? I remember finding madame de Staël very interesting and any young girl could read her.”
“But there are wicked people in all history,” cried Alix, aghast at this suggestion. “You all read Shakespeare, though he is full of wickedness. It is the point of view. The point of view of Saint-Simon is not wicked. He is ill-tempered, disagreeable, but upright; he means always to tell the truth. And then he was so devout, Monsieur; he was such a devout Christian.”
This was wily of her, and Mr. Westmacott, easily reassured, agreed; “Yes, yes, I see that.”
When Giles came home for the holidays, Toppie and her father had gone again to Bournemouth. “She might have waited a week longer, so that I could see her,” said Giles sadly. It was still taken happily for granted that Alix should sit with Giles in the mornings. There were fires everywhere this Winter, but she was more than ever glad of the refuge. Ruth had become a rather overwhelming presence. She had made new friends at Somerville and spent the first fortnight of her holidays with them in London, going to art-student dances in Chelsea and medical-student dances in Bloomsbury, and returning to her home with what Alix felt to be many a foolish flourish added to her sensible signature. She addressed Alix as “dear old ass,” and her favourite exclamation was “God!”
“It is so unlike our mon Dieu,” Alix could not forbear writing to Maman. “It is as if one saw a hen suddenly lay an ostrich egg—and so proud of it. I think when English people like Ruth become emancipated, they are very like hens laying ostrich eggs. There is such a strain; and, when it is all over, it is not an interesting object.”
Ruth had been meant by nature to be like Aunt Bella, though with much of beauty added. She was tall and large and brightly fair. She had little gaiety, but she gave an impression of massive cheerfulness; and it knocked you down if you impeded it, and strode, almost gravely, on its way. Alix was pleased to feel that Giles, too, found Ruth irritating. He could be very sharp with her, especially when she patronized her mother. But Ruth now, fortified by her new experience of life and in less awe of a brother, was not to be quelled by sharpness, so that if Giles had not withdrawn into gloomy silences there would often have been quarrels.
“There’s no harm in her. She’s as good as gold. She’d go to the stake for Mummy if it were necessary, cheerfully and as a matter of course; only she’s so insufferably conceited,” Giles grumbled to Alix in the study. “Why didn’t you tell her she knew nothing about it, when she was chaffing you about French manners and customs just now? All she knows about French manners are those of the professor’s family she stayed with in Paris. Why didn’t you tell her to shut up?”
“That would have been rude,” said Alix.