“Don’t you think Marigold quite extraordinarily beautiful?” Jerry inquired. “Isn’t the colour of her hair and eyes a Hans Christian Andersen fairy-tale colour?”
“But she is much more like a Watteau than like a fairy-tale,” said Alix.
“But Watteau people are fairy-tale people.—You mean she’s an artificial fairy-tale.—Yes, I see what you mean.—And it’s really more Fragonard than Watteau, too—‘A dainty rogue in porcelain,’ that’s what she is. Do you read Meredith? I love him, though I know he is démodé just now.”
But Alix had not read Meredith.
Half an hour later, when Jerry had lightly hoisted her to the saddle and the groom had released the chestnut’s eager head, Alix felt as if, at last, she had discovered her true vocation. This—yes, even more than dancing—was what she had been made for.
She did not feel that she had anything to learn. She felt no fear. Her hands went easily where Jerry told her to put them; her knee and foot found their security. Nothing this delicious creature could do, moving with satin ease and steel strength beneath her, would take her unawares. She understood him, and he, his gentle ears quivering at the sound of her voice, understood her. “Yes; yes, I see,” she said, as Jerry gave his explanations. “Yes, we will walk to the end so that I shall be quite used to it and then canter on the turf. Yes; I understand; holding with my knee.”
It was not swimming, or dancing, or flying, but it combined the delights of all three. One floated, buoyantly sustained; one embodied the beauty of rhythmic movement; one glided at a height strange enough for a sense of slight, delicious trembling. The earth was new, seen from this height; one looked into the branches of the beeches at the level where the chaffinches were perching and flitting.
“You sit as if you were born to it,” Jerry told her, and she replied that her father had been a great horseman.
Then came the canter. It surprised her a little. For one surging moment, cheeks hot, lips closed fast, she felt that she was coming off and then, suddenly, that nothing could bring her off. Between that fast-held knee and that supple foot, she was poised in safety. Her mind and body adjusted themselves to the sense of mastered peril.
“Splendid!” Jerry smiled at her when they drew rein at the end of the long upland.