Hugh rolled over on the ground in a sort of agony at the thought.
“Agnes will call him Galahad more than ever,” he went on, “and Mrs. Owen will dedicate the Galahad cycle to him, and Ambrose will feel that the early Christian martyrs couldn’t hold a candle to his blessed father—I wish they had—and they will all sit in a row with seraphic smiles and know how noble, and holy, and happy they all are, and especially that ass. He is an ass and a prig! And, oh, dear me, Edith, how dreadfully funny it all is! But I must, I absolutely must, tell Peggy about it. Supposing she happened to find out, how dreadfully unkind she would think me for not having told her.”
Edith had the highest opinion of the value of a sense of humour, and often, so it appeared to her, it would solve a situation, and restore a cheerful equanimity or even more to the sufferer from that situation, whereas an appeal to higher motives for tolerance might have been made in vain. And whether it was her words or Hugh’s own innate sense of the ludicrous that had thus restored him, she did not care at all. Something, anyhow, she or it or himself, had dissipated his anger, and given him back the genial, though amused, outlook that a little while ago had been shrouded from him. His laughter, his rolling on the grass were kindly again, and kindliness, as she had said, she reckoned as a master-key to conduct. He might laugh at Canon Alington as much as he liked; he might laugh (and probably would) at her and her “pi jaw,” provided only he laughed not bitterly. His desire, too, to tell Peggy, as expressed just now, was whole worlds away from what his desire had been when he suggested the same thing to Mrs. Owen. He was kind again, and Edith felt as if some blot or stain had been taken off her own character.
But though kind again, Hugh immediately got grave again. After his agonised roll on the grass he sat up, and clasping his knees with his hands, leaned his chin on them, and looked at her with that kindled eye.
“Are you David?” he said—“are you David reincarnated that you expel evil spirits?”
Then Edith knew that it did matter whether it was she or Hugh’s own sense of humour that had restored him. She had told herself it did not; nor indeed in the abstract did it, but it mattered so much to her.
“Oh, Hugh, did I help?” she asked. “I am so glad!”
“Go on,” said he, “the evil spirit is only half-exorcised yet.”
“Ah, I have said it all!” she protested, “and I am afraid I was very lengthy about it. But I think it was all true, Hughie. Oh, I know it was!”
He smiled at her, waiting, entreating.