“Yes, I enjoyed it,” he said. “That was why I did it. I could easily have got down here in time for dinner.”
Up went the blind at that with a snap and a whirr, and Silvia’s face, beaming and delighted, smiled out at him.
“Oh, Peter, how lovely of you to tell me,” she cried. “Of course, I guessed, only I wouldn’t guess. There’s just the joy of it all.”
That came from her like the stroke of a bird’s wing, that bore it through the sunny air. With another stroke she returned to him.
“Now you’ve got no excuse for refusing my beautiful plan,” she said. “And it was nice of you not to tell me at once: you knew you had to some time, and it was all the better for keeping. My dear, there’s the dressing bell. Just go and see your father for a minute: you can talk to him in the smoking-room after mother and I have gone to bed.”
As Silvia heard through her bedroom door the splashings and the rinsings and the gurglings which regulated her own speed of dressing, she was absorbed in the perception of the one thing that was great, and its myriad manifestations. Up the trunk of the tree and through the branches and to the remotest ends of the twigs flowed the sap, and all—the firmness of the trunk, the vigour of the branches, the elasticity of the twigs, the decoration of flower and leaf and fruit, which made the tree lovely—were manifestations and embodiments of the sap. If there was a wound in its bark, the sap healed it; if there was a nest among its boughs, an external loveliness of life which visited it, it was still the sap which had fashioned its anchorage. The remotest leaf of that tower of forest greenery was nurtured by it, and all the being and the beauty sprang from it.... There was nothing big or little, if you looked at it in that way, though just now she had decided that only one thing was big and all the rest was little....
Then came a rare, an unusual splash. Occasionally when Peter began to stand up in his bath after the hot soaking, he fell down; his foot slipped on the smooth surface, and this made the rare and enormous splash. This always caused her a certain anxiety: he might hit his head against the edge of the bath....
“Just tap at the bathroom door, Wilton,” she said, “and ask if Mr. Mainwaring is all right.”... But before the chaste Wilton could get as far as the door, a new splashing began. “It doesn’t matter, Wilton,” she said.
“Your pearls, ma’am?” asked Wilton.
Then came the tap at the door, and Wilton slid out of the picture.