“Or a cow,” said Arthur, gloomily.
“I think that if we did go away together,” Sylvia said, meditatively, “I should leave you almost at once, because you will keep returning to things I said. My father used to be like that.”
“But if we go away,” Arthur asked, “how are we going to live? I shouldn’t be any use on racecourses. I’m the sort of person that gets taken in by the three-card trick.”
“You make me so angry when you talk like that,” Sylvia said. “Of course if you think you’ll always be a fool, you always will be a fool. Being in love with me must make you think that you’re not a fool. Perhaps we never shall go away together; but if we do, you’ll have to begin by stealing bicycles. Jimmy Monkley and my father did that for a time. You hire a bicycle and sell it or pawn it a long way off from the shop it came from. It’s quite easy. Only, of course, it’s best to disguise yourself. Father used to paint out his teeth, wear blue glasses, and powder his mustache gray. But once he made himself so old in a place called Lewisham that the man in the bicycle-shop thought he was too old to ride and wouldn’t let him have a machine.”
Sylvia was strengthened in her resolve to launch Arthur upon the stormy seas of an independent existence by the placid harbor in which his mother loved to see him safely at anchor. Sylvia could not understand how a woman like Mrs. Madden, who had once been willing to elope with a groom, could bear to let her son spend his time so ineffectively. Not that she wished Mrs. Madden to exert her authority by driving him into a clerkship, or indeed into any profession for which he had no inclination, but she deplored the soft slavery which a fond woman can impose, the slavery of being waited upon that is more deadening than the slavery of waiting upon other people. She used to make a point of impressing upon Mrs. Madden the extent to which she and Arthur went shares in everything, lest she might suppose that Sylvia imitated her complaisance, and when Mrs. Madden used to smile in her tired way and make some remark about boy and girl lovers, Sylvia used to get angry and try to demonstrate the unimportance of that side of life.
“You funny child,” Mrs. Madden said. “When you’re older, how you’ll laugh at what you think now. Of course, you don’t know anything about love yet, mercifully for you. I wish I were richer; I should so like to adopt you.”
“Oh, but I wouldn’t be adopted,” Sylvia quickly interposed. “I can’t tell you how glad I am that I belong to nobody. And please don’t think I’m so innocent, because I’m not. I’ve seen a great deal of love, you must remember, and I’ve thought a lot about it, and made up my mind that I’ll never be a slave to that sort of thing. Arthur may be stupidly in love with me, but I’m very strict with him and it doesn’t do him any harm.”
“Come and sing your favorite song,” Mrs. Madden laughed. “I’ll play your accompaniment.”
All the discussions between them ended in music; Sylvia would sing that she was off with the raggle-taggle gipsies—or, stamping with her foot upon the floor of the old house until it shook and crossing her arms with such resolution that Arthur’s eyes would grow larger than ever, as if he half expected to see her act upon the words and fling herself out into the December night, regardless of all but a mad demonstration of liberty.
Sylvia would sometimes sing about the gipsies to herself while she was undressing, which generally called forth a protest from Mrs. Gustard, who likened the effect to that of a young volcano let loose.