“Good gracious me, no!”
“Then you must have. And you are clever, after all. Asking me to believe you’re not, and making that beautiful lace all the while, under my very eyes!”
“I’m not a bit clever. Here’s the pattern, you see, and there’s the thread, and the rest is only practice. I couldn’t make the pattern out of my head. Besides, I don’t like clever women.”
“A woman must try to be something.” Honoria felt that this was vague, but wanted to argue.
“A woman wants to be loved,” said Mrs. Raymond thoughtfully. “There’s such a heap to be done about the house that she won’t find time for much else. Besides, if she has children, she’ll be planning for them.”
“Isn’t that rather slow?”
Humility wondered where the child had picked up the word. “Slow?” she echoed, with her eyes on the horizon beyond the dunes. “Most things are slow when you look forward to them.”
“But these fairy-tales of yours?”
“I’ll tell you about them. When my mother was a girl of sixteen she went into service as a nursemaid in a clergyman’s family. Every evening the clergyman used to come into the nursery and tell the children a fairy-tale. That’s how it started. My mother left service to marry a farmer—it was quite a grand match for her—and when I was a baby she told the stories to me. She has a wonderful memory still, and she tells them capitally. When I listen I believe every word of them; I like them better than books, too, because they always end happily. But I can’t repeat them a bit. As soon as I begin they fall to pieces, and the pieces get mixed up, and, worst of all, the life goes right out of them. But Taffy, he takes the pieces and puts them together, and the tale is better than ever: quite different, and new, too. That’s the puzzle. It’s not memory with him; it’s something else.”
“But don’t you ever make up a story of your own?” Honoria insisted.