“The children and Hugh is unnecessary,” she said; “our three children are playing a mixture of ‘Lohengrin,’ ‘Red Riding Hood,’ ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ and pirates, but Hugh may only hop.”
“The darlings!” said Peggy enthusiastically. “Have they really dressed up as they intended? I want to dress up, too. Oh, what fortunate people you and I are!”
This was already cheering.
“Of course we are,” said Edith. “But why did you say that then? Yes, the ones with sugar on the top are excellent,” she added, as Peggy’s fingers hovered indecisively over the tea-table.
Peggy took one, and spoke with her mouth full.
“Why, by contrast, of course!” she said. “So many prosperous people aren’t fortunate. Because they haven’t got a mind, which is so important. Mind really became the text of ‘Things in General,’ which was an enormous success, and, oh, Edith, there was a shorthand writer there, who took it all down, and it’s going to appear in St. Olaf’s Parish Magazine. There’s fame for you!”
“Tell me about ‘Things in General,’” said Edith.
“I fully intended to. There will probably be parentheses. There’s one now, in fact. Do you know, I never understood Canon Alington’s mind till to-day, and then it all flashed on me. The explanation is that he hasn’t got one. He is a mosaic of ‘Things in General,’ golf, history, mottoes, the apostolic succession, the Literific, you, Hugh, Ambrose, me—not his wife, by the way, she is another him—but it’s all mosaic. It’s bits of things. It doesn’t make up It, which is ‘Things in General,’ and which is Life. With him you can pick pieces out—they aren’t fused together. Each bit is alone. And if you picked them all out, so that there was nothing left, he would go on buzzing still, like—a motor-car that throbs and won’t start.”
This was rather difficult to follow for anybody who had not heard the address on “Things in General,” but Edith was on the right tack.
“But you called him a ‘Mosaic of Things in General,’” she said. “Isn’t that something?”