“I was going to. It’s perfectly true. All the people who don’t eat potatoes and sweets for fear of getting fat become elephants, like mamma, who lives on cracknel biscuits.”
“Does she?” said Peter with deep interest. “How wonderful of her.”
“And all the people who take immense care of themselves die at the age of forty, because they are clinging to life, while those who break every ordinance of health never die at all. And all the people who lay themselves out to be brilliant are crashing bores——”
“Oh yes; proved,” said Peter. “Let’s go on to something else. What’s to happen to me when you marry?”
“Nothing,” said Nellie. “Why should it? You’ll go on being quite different from anybody else. That’s a career in itself. You aren’t human, anyhow, however many great-grandmammas you may have had. You’re a wild thing, partly domesticated, and when you’re tired of us all, you go waving your tail, and walking in the wet woods, and telling nobody. Kipling, you know. Then you come back rather sleepy and pleased, and allow us to put a blue riband round your neck and tickle you under the chin, and then you lie down on a cushion in front of the fire and purr. You don’t purr at us, though, you purr at yourself.”
“Lor!” said Peter. “All that about me!”
Nellie pushed back her hair from her forehead, and again plaited her fingers together. But this time it was no deliberative, meditative process, but a swift unconscious action.
“Yes, my dear, and there’s more, too,” she said. “It’s my swan-song, remember, for soon I am going to become ordinary and conventional. I used to go in the wet woods, too, you know, though we never met each other there. But that has been the bond between us, up till now we have been completely independent. You’re going to remain so, but not I. Oh, Peter, there was a bond! My dear, do you think that I’m rather mad? I have serious doubts about it myself.”
“You always were rather mad,” said he. “But go on; sing your swan-song.”
“Then don’t look as if you had taken a guinea stall to hear me,” she said. “Where had I got to? Oh, yes. There was a bond; you know it yourself. I’ve never been conscious of anybody else as I’ve been conscious of you, nor have you ever been conscious of anyone else as you’ve been conscious of me. You’ve never been in the least in love with me, nor have I with you. But we’re the same kind of person, and one doesn’t often see the same kind of person as oneself. Do you understand at all, or am I simply reading out of my own book?”