“Well, it is certainly hard to think of any exception to that rule,” he said, “though one always distrusts rules without exceptions. It seems so very unlikely that they should exist, considering how utterly different every one person is from every other. On the face of it, it seems impossible.”
This had aroused another train of thought in the girl.
“Oh, nothing would be impossible, if one were wise,” she said. “Oh, I hate fools. And I am one.”
And she snipped viciously among the sweet-peas.
He followed this with some success.
“Was the Sunday-school very stupid?” he asked, sympathetically.
“Hideously—quite hideously. How clever of you to guess. It was also extremely ugly. I don’t know which I dislike most, ugliness or stupidity. In fact, they are difficult to tell apart. Yet, after all, beauty is only skin deep.”
“But what has that to do with the wonder of it?” he asked. “That particular proverb seems to me about the silliest. Why, the most subtle brain in the world is only a few inches deep, and, as far as measurement goes, it is about the same depth as the most stupid. Or would you say that the beauty of some wonderful evening moment of a Corot was only skin deep, the depth of the paint on the canvas? Surely not. It has all the depth of beauty of the summer night. No, that proverb is perfectly meaningless, and was probably invented by somebody more than usually plain.”
Helen’s basket of sweet-peas was full, and she emerged from the fragrant tangle of the garden-beds and strolled with him up the lawn, her face on flame with what he had called curiosity. That divine moment, when a girl becomes a woman, when all she has drunk in all her life begins to make products of its own had just come to her. And at this psychological moment he had come, too.
“But surely one sees very beautiful people who are very dull, very stupid, very wicked even,” she said. “Is not that what the proverb means, perhaps, that as far as beauty itself goes it is only a very superficial gift?”