Giles was looking at her with a sort of astonishment, at once tender and amused. “But I’m not your father, Alix,” he said.
“You are the only father I have ever known,” Alix replied, and, looking down as she said this, she felt her eyes heavy with sudden tears.
“Well, then, dear little Alix,”—Giles must have seen the tears for he spoke very gently,—“since I’m to take a father’s place, may I ask you what you said to this young man,—this young man, whatever his faults, whom I thought eligible in every way. Highly eligible and altogether suitable.”
“I said I could not marry in England,” said Alix, and it was with difficulty now that she restrained her tears, remembering her proud words to Giles about an English marriage on the cliff-path last summer; remembering Jerry, so bright and beautiful, and France, brighter and more beautiful and with claims far deeper than any Jerry could put forward. What meaning could life have for any Frenchwoman out of France? Did not all one’s meaning come from her?
“And what did Jerry say to that?” Giles was inquiring.
“He said I was too young. He said he would wait. He said he could perhaps live in France for part of the time. He did not speak very reasonably.”
“It seems to me that he spoke very reasonably, indeed. He can wait. And you are very young. How old is it you are now, Alix?”
“I shall be eighteen in July. Not young enough to change as much as he expects,” said Alix. “No, he was not reasonable, for he contradicted himself a great deal. I am afraid he did not mean what he said. I don’t think that he means to wait. I don’t think that he really would live in France. Afterwards, when we had talked a little more and he had felt that I was not so young—he spoke very wildly.”
“How wildly?”
A faint flush rose in Alix’s cheeks. “He did not please me in the way he behaved. It could not have happened like that with us.—Our way, I think, is a better way.”