"No; you must live to brighten these dull Devonshire winters and strew flowers upon your husband and me when our turns come. Dear old Stapledon! I'm really bothered to know that something is troubling him. I'd tackle him myself, only if you cannot win the truth, I certainly should not. I wish he'd be confidential; I do like confidential men. For my part I haven't got a secret from him in the world."
"He works too hard."
"He does. The man has a horrible genius for making work. It knocks the vitality out of him. I hate this modern gospel that sets all of us poor little world-children to our lessons as a panacea for every evil under the sun. Just look what dull dogs all the hard workers are."
"Well, you've played truant from your youth up."
"Deliberately, as an example to others. But I'm doing any amount of work now. Brain-work too; which is easily the most hateful sort of work. And all for my Godleigh. Yet she doesn't thank me. I see poor Mother Nature stealing about miserably and suspiciously when I go into the woods. She liked me better a pauper. She doesn't know that I'm helping her to make this little corner of earth more and more perfect. She doesn't look ahead and judge how much toil and trouble I am saving her with the ruins of things that must be cleared away—either by her method or my quicker one. She hates axes and ploughs and pruning-hooks, old stick-in-the-mud that she is."
"Treason!"
"No treason at all. Common sense I call it. I'm weary of this nonsense about going straight to Nature. Australia taught me to suspect. She's a bat, a mole; she doesn't know her best friends. She'll sink a saint in mid-ocean—a real saint with an eighteen-carat halo—and let a pirate come safely and happily to some innocent merchantman stuffed with the treasures of honest men, or her own priceless grains and seeds. She'll put back the hand of progress at the smallest opportunity; she'll revert to the primitive if you turn your back on her for an instant; she'll conjure our peaches into wild plums, our apples into crabs, man into—God knows what—something a good deal lower than the angels, or even the cave-dwellers. If we let her, she would hunt for and polish up the missing link again, and huddle the world backwards faster than we spin round the sun. Nature is a grand fraud, Honor. Take the personal attitude, for instance. What has she ever done for me? Did she show me any of her hoarded gold during the month I nearly killed myself exploring in New South Wales? Did she lead me to the water-holes when I was thirsty, or lend me a cloud to hide the sun when I was hot? Has she opened a flower-bud, or taught a bird to sing, or painted a dawn, or ever led the wind out of the east, that I might be the happier? We fool ourselves that we are her favourites. Not so. She is only our stepmother, and behaves accordingly. She knew that the advent of conscious intelligence must be a death-blow to her, and she has never forgiven man for exhibiting it."
"So I'm not the only one in Little Silver who is developing opinions, I see," laughed Honor. "You're growing egotistical, Christo; you're expecting almost too much, I fear. Nature has something better to do than plan your private fortune and convenience, or arrange the winds of heaven to suit a cold in that silly head of yours! Never in my most dead-alive moment did I grow so dull as that. To be cross with poor Nature—as if she had not to do what she is told, like everybody else. To blame her!"
"I don't blame her. I know where to throw the blame of things perfectly well."
"Then you're the only man in the world who does, and you ought to tell everybody and so make yourself famous."