“Well,” asked Rosamund regarding him with round eyes.
“I should feel as if I were in fancy dress,” he said. Rosamund was less impatient than might have been expected.
“Do you mean,” she asked very slowly, as if she were thinking things out, “that you find you feel more natural in those things?”
“Why, of course,” he cried with a sort of delight. “Why, they are more natural. Lots of things are really more natural, though I’ve never had them in my life. It’s natural to hold your head up, but I never did it before. I used to put my hands in my trousers’ pockets and somehow that seems to mean standing always with a sort of a stoop. Now I put my hands in my belt and it makes me feel ten inches taller. Why, look at this spear.”
He had a habit of walking about with the boar-spear which King Richard had carried in his capacity of forester; and he now planted the staff in the grass to bring it to her attention, though it was very literally as plain as a pike-staff.
“The minute you begin to carry a thing of this sort,” he cried, “you realise at once why men generally used to carry long poles of one sort or another; spears or pikes or pilgrims’ staffs, or pastoral staffs. You can hold them at arm’s length and then throw your head back as if it wore a crest. You have to lean down to the little modern walking-sticks in order to lean on them; as if you were leaning on a crutch, and so you are. The whole of this world of ours is leaning on a crutch, because it is a cripple.”
Then he stopped abruptly and looked at her with a sort of sudden timidity.
“But you . . . I was just thinking you ought to walk about with a sceptre like a spear . . . but, of course . . . if you really disapprove of it all–.”
“I’m not sure,” she answered in her slow and slightly perplexed manner, which contrasted occasionally with her usual voluble efficiency, “I’m not perfectly sure I do disapprove of it.”
He seemed to experience a silent shock of relief, not perhaps very easy to explain. But indeed this was the element in his demeanour which is least easily explained. For all his lifted head and leonine demeanour in moments of abstraction, for all the fixity of his attitude or antic, he had not any air of impudence or even, in the ordinary sense, of defiance. He was simply embarrassed, or rather paralysed, in the presence of his own old clothes. In short he had precisely the same attitude about getting out of his green costume that he had once had about getting into it.