"Francis was a naughty boy," said Pauline.
Since they were sitting in the nursery, her mother allowed the Christian name to pass without reproof.
"He was so exactly like Guy," said Margaret.
"Like Guy?" Pauline echoed incredulously.
"Yes, of course, didn't you notice that?" Margaret laughed.
"You're quite right, Margaret," said Mrs. Grey. "How clever of you to see. Now of course I realize how much alike they were ... how clever you are!"
"Without Pauline," Margaret went on, "Guy might easily become his father all over again."
"But, my dears," said Pauline, "that would be terrible. I remember how frightened I was of Guy the first day he came to the Rectory, and if he grows more like his father, I don't think I shall ever be anything else but frightened of him, even if we live for ever. For, though I'm sure he's really very sweet, I don't believe one would ever get quite used to Mr. Hazlewood."
Yet when Pauline was alone and had an opportunity to look back upon the visit, its effect was rather encouraging than otherwise. For one thing it curiously made Guy more actual, because until the personality of his father projected itself upon the scene of their love he had always possessed for Pauline a kind of romantic unreality. In the Spring days and Summer days which had seemed to dedicate themselves to the service of intimacy, Guy had talked a great deal of his life before they met, but the more he had told her, the more was she in the state of being unable to realize that the central figure of these old tales was not a dream. When he was with her, she was often in a daze of wonder at the credibility of being loved like this; and there was never an occasion of seeing him even after the briefest absence that did not hold in the heart of its pleasure a surprize at his return. The appearance of Mr. Hazlewood was a phenomenon that gave the pledge of prosaic authority to her love, like a statement in print that however absurd or uncomfortable has a value so far beyond mere talk. She had often been made rather miserable by Guy's tales of the ladies he had loved with airy heedlessness, but these heroines had all faded out in the unreality of his life apart from her, and they took their place with days of adventure described in Macedonia or with the old diversions of Oxford. The visit of Mr. Hazlewood with the chilly disapproval it had shed was more authentic than, for instance, the idea of Guy's dark-eyed mother, who had seemed in his narrations almost to threaten Pauline with her son's fairy ancestry, as if from the grave she might at any moment summon him away. Mr. Hazlewood had carried with him a wonderful assurance of ordinariness. The merely external resemblance between him and his son proved that Guy could grow old; and the sense of his opposition was a trifling discomfort in comparison with the assurance he offered of an imaginable future. She remembered that her first idea of Guy had been that of someone dry and cynical; and no doubt this first impression of his father was equally wrong. She who had been so shy and speechless was no doubt much to blame, and the family had done nothing to help out the situation. It had been unkind of her father to hide himself, since to Mr. Hazlewood, who could not have understood that it was the sort of thing her father would be sure to do, such behaviour must have presented itself very oddly.
The Rector on Pauline's remonstrating with him was not at all penitent.