“Very likely. A more indifferent thing; you will laugh, but my enthusiasm was for chivalry, Christian chivalry, half symbolic. History was delightful to me for the search for true knights. I had lists of them, drawings if possible, but I never could indoctrinate anybody with my affection. Either history is only a lesson, or they know a great deal too much, and will prove to you that the Cid was a ruffian, and the Black Prince not much better.”
“And are you allowed the ‘Idylls of the King’?”
“Under protest, now that the Mouse-trap has adopted Browning for weekly reading and discussion. Tennyson is almost put on the same shelf with Scott, whom I love better than ever. Is it progress?”
“Well, I suppose it is, in a way.”
“But is it the right way?”
“That’s what I want to see.”
“Now listen. When our young men, my brothers—especially my very dear brother Claude and his contemporaries, Rotherwood is the only one left—were at Oxford, they got raised into a higher atmosphere, and came home with beautiful plans and hopes for the Church, and drew us up with them; but now the University seems just an ordeal for faith to go through.”
“I should think there was less of outward temptation, but more of subtle trial. And then the whole system has altered since the times you are speaking of, when the old rules prevailed, and the great giants of Church renewal were there!” said Geraldine.
“You belong to the generation whom they trained, and who are now passing away. My father was one who grew up then.”
“We live on their spirit still.”