“I can’t help feeling that he isn’t good enough for Alix, Giles,” said Toppie. “He’s too young and light and gay.”
Again Giles stopped to think. “I don’t say he’s good enough. But who is good enough for Alix? She’s stuff in her for two, and lightness and gaiety are in her blood as well as the things Jerry lacks. Jerry could make her very happy. That’s what I’m quite sure of, Toppie. I want him for her, and I shouldn’t want him unless I believed he could make her happy.—For who is good enough, really, for our little Alix?” Giles repeated.
Toppie had listened to him, her eyes looking out over the garden. Now, turning them on him with a smile, she said quite suddenly: “You are good enough. You must marry Alix, Giles.”
How strange it was. Madame Vervier had said almost those words only a year ago and they had wakened not an echo in him. Now, as he heard them spoken in Toppie’s confident voice a great confusion of fear, pain, loneliness started up in Giles’s heart. It was as if he had been waiting for Toppie to say them; as if he had felt that deep-toned bell hanging in some sanctuary of his nature and known that Toppie would thus strike upon it, sending the reverberations far into the past as well as into the future. For a moment he could hardly think, he was so deafened by the clamour, and then the first words that came were helpless words: “She wouldn’t have me, Toppie, dear.”
“Why not?” smiled Toppie. She had taken his avowal quite for granted.
“If she loves anyone, it’s Jerry.”
“They won’t marry,” said Toppie. “There are too many difficulties; and he doesn’t love her enough.”
“Yes, he does, if he’s helped. It’s someone like Jerry she needs; someone young and gay, with things to offer her. I’ve nothing to offer Alix.”
“You have your love. No one will ever love Alix as you do.” Toppie’s loving eyes scanned his face while her confident voice thus assured him.
“But that’s no reason, for her.—She’ll have other people’s love. It’s true, dear Toppie; of course. I see it’s true; and I suppose I’ve known it for a long time. But Alix would never think of me like that. She thinks of me as her brother. She thinks of me as her father, almost; as someone kind and gruff and paternal. Alix is the fairy princess, and I’m just the good old beast who carries her around on my back.”