"Then this—I'm not worrying you to tell me—but if it is somebody else's secret—"
"Well, it is," she said. "Now, are you satisfied? And if you'll only let me look at the sea and the mountains and the heather the Chester cloud will go right away. It's nearly gone now. And I've never seen any real mountains before, not mountains like these, with warm colors and soft shapes—only the Pyrenees and the Maritime Alps, and they look just like white cardboard cut into points and pasted on blue sugar-paper—that's the sky."
"It's prettier at sunrise, with the mountains like pink and white sugar, and Corsica showing like a little cloud over the sea. We had a villa at Antibes when I was a little chap, before we lost our money. We'll go there again some day, shall we, and see if the mountains have changed at all? Not this winter, I think. I've never had an English winter free from work I didn't like. I must have just this one. You don't mind?"
What he hoped she wouldn't mind was less the English winter than his calm assumption that there was plenty of time, that they would always be together and might go where they would and when—since all the future was before them—all the future, and each other's companionship all through it.
"Why should I mind?" she answered. "I've never had a free winter in England, either, or anywhere else, for that matter."
"Then that's settled," said he, comfortably, "and you can't think what a comfort it is to me that you don't hate Charles. You might so easily have hated dogs."
"If I'd been that sort of person I shouldn't be here."
"Ah, but Charles might so easily have been the one kind of dog you couldn't stand. He's not everybody's dog, by any means. Are you, Charles? Of course it's almost incredible that this earth should contain people who don't like Charles, yet so it is."
"The people he's bitten?"
"Oh, those!" said Edward, adding, with a fine air of tolerance, "I could almost find excuses for them—they've not seen the finer aspects of his character. No, there are actually human beings to whom Charles's personality does not appeal—persons whom he has borne with patiently, whom he has refrained from biting, or even sniffing at the trousers legs of. Prejudice is a mysterious and terrible thing. Oh, but it's a good world—all the same."