“What are you going to do with it?” she asked. He looked puzzled. “With life, I mean,” she added.
“Don’t know. It depends.”
“On what?”
“People,” he answered vaguely, taking care to avoid mentioning Cherry. “I may travel for a year. Perhaps Kay will come with me. After that I’m going into my father’s business.”
The golden woman’s face became grave; beneath its gravity was a flame of excitement. Her voice trembled and reached him softly. “That’s not what I meant. That’s not doing anything with life. Those things are incidents—externals. I meant, are you going to live life, or are you going to miss everything? Life’s an ocean, full of enduring, dotted with a few islands. Are you going to be an explorer—or are you going to miss everything?”
Odd that she, of all persons, should have asked him that! He remembered how Harry had said that she was a ship, always setting sail for new lands and never coming to anchor.
“An explorer! I’ll first see the islands.”
A strand of her hair broke loose and fluttered about her eyes. “I can’t put it back,” she said. “I wish you’d do it.” Her hands were occupied with the reins. He leant across her. As his face came under hers, she held her breath. To him it was nothing. The horses, feeling her hands go slack, broke into a gallop; for a moment she lost control of them. When she had quieted them, she turned to him impulsively, “Peter, you’re a darling.” Her eyes held his with an expression of appeal and challenge; then faltered, as though they were afraid to look at him.
Her excitement communicated itself. He was embarrassed. He didn’t understand. He guessed that she was in trouble and was asking for his kindness. “Golden woman, how easily you and I say things like that. If Cherry had said it to me, or if you had said it to the Faun Man, how much more——.”
She cut him short. “Don’t.”