“That would shock Rickie,” said Agnes, laughing. “He’s frightfully high-principled.”
“No, I’m not,” said Rickie, thinking of his recent shiftiness over breakfast.
“Then come for a walk with me. I want exercise. Some connection of ours was once rector of Madingley. I shall walk out and see the church.”
Mrs. Lewin was accordingly left in the Union.
“This is jolly!” Agnes exclaimed as she strode along the somewhat depressing road that leads out of Cambridge past the observatory. “Do I go too fast?”
“No, thank you. I get stronger every year. If it wasn’t for the look of the thing, I should be quite happy.”
“But you don’t care for the look of the thing. It’s only ignorant people who do that, surely.”
“Perhaps. I care. I like people who are well-made and beautiful. They are of some use in the world. I understand why they are there. I cannot understand why the ugly and crippled are there, however healthy they may feel inside. Don’t you know how Turner spoils his pictures by introducing a man like a bolster in the foreground? Well, in actual life every landscape is spoilt by men of worse shapes still.”
“You sound like a bolster with the stuffing out.” They laughed. She always blew his cobwebs away like this, with a puff of humorous mountain air. Just now the associations he attached to her were various—she reminded him of a heroine of Meredith’s—but a heroine at the end of the book. All had been written about her. She had played her mighty part, and knew that it was over. He and he alone was not content, and wrote for her daily a trivial and impossible sequel.
Last time they had talked about Gerald. But that was some six months ago, when things felt easier. Today Gerald was the faintest blur. Fortunately the conversation turned to Mr. Pembroke and to education. Did women lose a lot by not knowing Greek? “A heap,” said Rickie, roughly. But modern languages? Thus they got to Germany, which he had visited last Easter with Ansell; and thence to the German Emperor, and what a to-do he made; and from him to our own king (still Prince of Wales), who had lived while an undergraduate at Madingley Hall. Here it was. And all the time he thought, “It is hard on her. She has no right to be walking with me. She would be ill with disgust if she knew. It is hard on her to be loved.”