Alix’s sense of sadness had deepened while Toppie spoke. So different Toppie’s past; so different Toppie’s mother, she felt sure: and the sense of sadness was in the difference. An abyss seemed to lie between her and Toppie, an abyss that Toppie did not see and could not, perhaps, even imagine. She could not place Toppie against any of the backgrounds familiar to her. She could not see her in Maman’s salon, unless as one of those dim evasive figures, the “Misses” of her childhood, someone dressed differently, hovering diffidently and helping with the tea and cakes. She could see Toppie in Maman’s salon as her governess, but in no other capacity. Toppie would not understand anything said there, or would not care to understand. She would draw away from the shining soap-bubble. She would look with cold dismay at madame Gérardin and mademoiselle Fontaine. It was sad to feel fond of someone and to feel them fond of you, and yet to see that only here, among her doves, could their worlds touch at all.
It was growing dark, and Toppie said that she would take her home, and, in the hall, lighted a little lantern for the walk across the common. They had gone halfway when they saw, in the distance, another lantern advancing towards them.
“It is Giles,” said Toppie, pausing. “He has come for you. So I will go back. I have some letters to finish for the post.”
“But come to meet him. He will, I am sure, be glad of a word with you,” said Alix. She felt sure that it had been in the hope of a word with Toppie rather than to fetch herself that Giles had come.
“Oh, we have so many words; every day; all our lives long,” said Toppie, and, though she continued to advance, Alix felt a slight constraint in her voice. “He is a dear, is he not, Giles?” she added, as if irrelevantly.
“Oh, a dear!” said Alix. “I felt him that at once. And so good; and so intelligent.”—“More intelligent than Captain Owen; more good,” was in her mind. But that made, she knew, no difference. People were not loved for their intelligence, or their goodness, either.
“A great dear, Giles,” Toppie repeated, but with no intention, evidently, of being urged by her young companion’s warmth beyond her own sense of due commendation. “Owen loved him devotedly. After his mother it was Giles he loved best of all his family.”
“They were all three of the same pâte, were they not.”
“Pâte?” Toppie questioned. Her French was not quite so good as Giles’s.
“The paste, you know, of which earthenware or porcelain is made.”