“Yes, darling, you are quite right,” he said. “I will finish it at once; and then we’ll take baby off to some seaside place, and—and build sand-castles, and have a little jaunt generally.”
* * * * *
May went to bed early that night, and when the house was still Tom took up the little rough sketch of Persephone, and with a candle in his hand went into the studio. Demeter stood shining there, her head bent in sorrow for her child. Tom looked at her long and steadily. The candle threw her shadow vaguely and distortedly on to the walls and ceiling, but the statue itself stood out radiantly from the obscurity round. He took hold of the cold marble hand and stood there looking up to the down-bent face.
“Good-bye,” he whispered. “You are not wanted. And I—I have another goddess and another child.”
EPILOGUE.
Tom and Manvers were sitting at the bottom of a punt in one of the upper reaches of the Thames on a September afternoon. Tom had taken out a fishing-rod, but it was too hot to do more than smoke. Smoke produces silence, and neither had spoken for some time. Manvers had arrived ten days ago, and was staying with Tom in a small house he had lately bought, in which he spent the summer months.
“It’s only three years since I saw you last,” he said at length, “but you look more than three years older.”
Tom took his pipe out of his mouth and blew away a cloud of blue smoke.
“I feel eighty-four,” he said. “Prosperity isn’t so soothing as I was led to believe. I think worrying and fighting would have kept me young. You are the only person who always remains twenty-five. How have you managed it?”
“Growing old is absolutely a matter of will,” said Manvers. “It is like Alice eating the mushroom to make her grow tall or short. You can eat which side of it you like: one side makes you old, the other keeps you young. No one need grow old unless he likes. The secret is to take nothing seriously. I only once took anything seriously, and it made me three years older in a single night. Consequently I am twenty-eight, not twenty-five.”