"Pam!" he said. "Best woman in all the world! Pam, there's something about you—it upsets all my theories; I seem just a pretty helpless sort of rotter."
I tried to find the right words to say.
The bracken swayed, a delicate, golden trellis broken here and there into turquoise like a mosaic; the birches shook their golden spangles; and the little harebells, their stems invisible in the welter of gold, swayed like jewels on invisible chains: all the world was wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, and its wonder was throbbing in me, and all I could say was:
"When is the next train?"
VIII
I am writing this in my bedroom at Cromer Court, at a Queen Anne desk, and by-and-by I am going to climb in a Queen Anne bed to watch the firelight flicker on the white panelled walls, on the quaintest chintz I have ever seen covering the chairs and the great divan, and fluttering like restless wings over open windows—pale green linen, the colour of young leaves, with bunches of white-heart cherries scattered over it.
I feel simple as a milkmaid and good as a nun in this dear old house, and I have never felt so happy. It is a precarious happiness. I should think the wives of the husbands home on leave feel it the last two days. It is a sort of happiness that freezes you while you are hugging it to you because of its warmth, and turns and rends you while you are caressing it—painful and beautiful at the same time.
I saw Cheneston's mother to-night for a few moments.
She is like one of those exquisite miniatures in the Academy that no one but miniaturists ever stay long enough to examine; her skin is like a child's, her eyes are Cheneston's eyes grown infinitely gentle—those queer hazel eyes that look, in a miniature, as if the paint had never dried.
"So this is Pam," she said, looking up at me, and her voice is like Cheneston's, grown faint and gentle; it has the same curious quality that makes you feel thrilled, and causes all the little nerves in your spine to "ping" as they do at an exciting play. "My son," she said, "I am so proud—such a vain old woman!—proud that you should have won such a woman—the only sort of woman that could ever have held you, son."