“If you weren’t so pretty, and hadn’t that delightful air of having just embraced the Social Gospel, you’d be a prig,” he said to himself. To her he said: “Roughly speaking, don’t you think the conventional classifications correspond fairly well with the real ones?”
“No,” she answered roundly.
And when the mother returned, weary from her calls, she found her tenant and her daughter still discussing the problems of good and evil, of heredity and environment, of social inequalities and the injustice of the world. The girl fought for her views, and she fought fairly, if fiercely. It was the first of many such fights. When he had gone the mother protested.
“Dearest,” said the girl, “I can’t help it! I must live my own life, as people say in plays. After all, I’m twenty-six. I’ve always talked to people if I liked them—even strangers in railway carriages. And people aren’t wild beasts, you know: everything is always all right. And this man can talk; he knows about things. And he’s a gentleman. That ought to satisfy you—that and his references. Don’t worry, there’s a darling. Just be nice to him yourself. He’s simply a godsend in a place like this.”
“He’ll fall in love with you, Celia,” said the mother warningly.
“Not he!” said the daughter. But the mother was right.
Living alone in the queer little cottage, the world, his accustomed life, the Brydges woman, all seemed very far away. Miss Sheepmarsh was very near. Her frank enjoyment of his talk, her gay acceptance of their now almost constant companionship, were things new in his experience of women, and might have warned him that she at least was heart-whole. They would have done had he ever faced the fact that his own heart had caught fire. He bicycled with her along the pleasant Kentish lanes; he rowed with her on the little river of dreams; he read to her in the quiet of the August garden; he gave himself up wholly to the pleasure of those hours that flew like moments—those days that passed like hours. They talked of books and of the heart of books—and inevitably they talked of themselves. He talked of himself less than most men, but he learned much of her life. She was an ardent social reformer; had lived in an Art-and-Culture-for-the-People settlement in Whitechapel; had studied at the London School of Economics. Now she had come back to be with her mother, who needed her. She and her mother were almost alone in the world; there was enough to live on, but not too much. The letting of the little house had been Celia’s idea: its rent was merely for “luxuries.” He found out from the mother, when she came to tolerate him, that the “luxuries” were Celia’s—the luxuries of helping the unfortunate, feeding the hungry, and clothing little shivering children in winter time.
And all this while he had not heard a word of sister or cousin—of any one whom he might identify as the tobacconist’s assistant.
It was on an evening when the level sunbeams turned the meadows by the riverside to fine gold, and the willows and alders to trees of Paradise, that he spoke suddenly, leaning forward on his sculls. “Have you,” he asked, looking into her face, “any relation who is in a shop?”
“No,” said she; “why?”