The Graftons: A Novel

by Archibald Marshall

She did not hesitate; her ideas seemed to be clearly set. "That's mostly the young people," she said. "I'm only thinking now of the older ones, who really belong to the land. Their interests are in it, and I think it brings them something as near contentment as it is possible to have."

"You feel a little like that about it yourself, don't you?" he asked half shyly.

She smiled. "I suppose we are generally thinking a little about ourselves when we are talking about other people," she said. "I know how different my life is from theirs—how much more I want to—to keep me quiet. But I know that the more simple I make it, and the more it depends upon what lies around me, the happier I am."

He looked at her almost with veneration. She was an unusually pretty girl, with an expression of sweetness and kindness which was more than her beauty. To him she seemed so far above all other girls whom he had ever seen as to be of a different flesh and spirit. Beatrix was even more beautiful than Caroline, and she was kind and sweet too, though with more contrariety in her. But to him she was common clay beside Caroline, whose lightest word he was inclined to receive as an oracle. Both of them seemed to him, in his self-respecting timidity, far above himself. He had had no contact with the life they represented before he had come to Abington, and thought himself quite unfitted to take part in it, with its ease and elaboration of wealth and unfamiliar custom marking it at every turn. To think of himself as anywhere on the same footing as these shining girls would have seemed to him hardly less presumptuous than to think of himself as on a level with a Royal Princess. But just as the goddesses of old time filled the hearts of mortal men with bliss by showing them what they shared with them, but never lost their godhead by so doing, so Caroline moved his wonder and admiration by letting him into some of the secret places of her nature, which was as fair as its outward form, but still remained high above him.

"It's what I feel," he said gently, "though I lived a dull life before I came here, and you lived a gay one. I've given up nothing that I wanted. I enjoy my life much more; but still it's a good deal simpler than it was."

"It comes of doing the work you like in the surroundings you like," she said sagely. "With a woman it isn't so much the work as all the little ways of spending her time. She doesn't as a rule, unless she's creative, or has to earn her own living, work by herself, or for herself. She is in touch with others all the time. I never thought of myself as having a place here, except the one I have always had at home. But I have, you know. I've made friends with a great many people. We all have. We know most of the people in the village, and all the children. I suppose I just thought of Abington, when we first came down, as a lovely house in which we could enjoy ourselves, by ourselves, or with the friends we asked to come here, and the people we should get to know in the houses round. I never thought of it as a place with a few hundred people living right round you. But now I know them, it's different. I have plenty of friends among them too, friends who tell me things about themselves, and like to hear what I have to tell them. I think I have made myself part of the machine, after all. But I like to think about it as a big family."

They were walking back to the tennis lawn by this time. "Yes, that's what Worthing meant by the human side," said Bradby. "I know he thinks a lot about that, and we have talked about it. It isn't giving them charity; they don't want that; or they ought not to want it. It's feeling that you're all the same flesh and blood. If there has been anything wrong with the system, that's what has kept it together all these years."

Richard Mansergh and Beatrix did not talk about the system when they presently betook themselves for a stroll in the evening sunlight, before he mounted his horse to ride home. He had, in truth, a little difficulty in persuading her to take it with him, for his admiration of her had by this time reached the point at which it demanded expression, and expression in its turn was apt to demand answers of a kind which she was not ready to give. But at this time she rather prided herself upon her total immunity from the softer passions, and gained some satisfaction in fencing with them when they were obtruded on her notice. It was only a question of whether or no she was in the mood to exercise her wits that made her accept or decline these contests, and she had only hung back a little because her late activities had rather tired her.

She was enough to turn the head of any man, with her sweet flower-like face, whose mischievous eyes only made it more bewitching. She was only nineteen, and her slender form had hardly yet filled out to womanhood, but showed delicious soft curves of neck and shoulder. She wore a short white skirt and a white silk blouse, all very workmanlike for her play, but most femininely becoming. A wide-brimmed hat, which she caught up from the seat beside her, slightly altered the note of her clothes. She seemed to the young man more desirable thus, walking by his side, than in the activities of the game, although he had admired her grace and skill too while she had been playing. Perhaps the hat was put on instinctively to soften the impressions of athleticism; but a wide hat brim also conceals eyes and mouth from one who is considerably taller, when it is to be desired that they shall be concealed.