“Gladys and Enid laugh very easily,” he answered. “Personally I see nothing funny in a man, especially a clergyman, behaving like a clown.”
“Oh, Philip, you’re impossible!” Sylvia cried.
“Thanks,” he said, dryly. “I’ve noticed that ever since the arrival of our young guests you’ve found more to complain of in my personality even than formerly.”
“Young guests!” Sylvia echoed, scornfully. “Who would think, to hear you talk now, that you married a child? Really you’re incomprehensible.”
“Impossible! Incomprehensible! In fact thoroughly negative,” Philip said.
Sylvia shrugged her shoulders and left him.
The twins went back to school at the beginning of May, and Sylvia, who missed them very much, had to fall back on Mr. Dorward to remind her of their jolly company. Their intercourse, which the twins had established upon a certain plane, continued now upon the same plane. Life had to be regarded as Alice saw it in Wonderland or through the looking-glass. Sylvia remembered with irony that it was Philip who first introduced her to those two books; she decided he had only liked them because it was correct to like them. Mr. Dorward, however, actually was somebody in that fantastic world, not like anybody Alice met there, but another inhabitant whom she just happened to miss.
To whom else but Mr. Dorward could have occurred that ludicrous adventure when he was staying with a brother priest in a remote part of Devonshire?
“I always heard he was a little odd. However, we had dinner together in the kitchen. He only dined in the drawing-room on Thursdays.”
“When did he dine in the dining-room?” Sylvia asked.