How much they had to say to each other. There was no end to their talk, their eager exchange of opinions. Chickover was dim as a dream now in Catherine’s mind; and the Catherine who had gone to bed there every evening in a growing wretchedness was a dream within a dream. With Christopher she was alive. He himself was so tremendously alive that one would indeed have to be a hopeless mummy not to catch life from him and wake up. Besides, it was impossible to be—anyhow for a short time—with some one who adored one, unless he was physically repulsive, and not be happy. That Christopher adored her was plain to the very passers-by. The men who passed grinned to themselves in sympathy; the women sighed; and old ladies, long done with envy, smiled with open benevolence between their bonnet-strings.
Unconscious of everybody except each other, they walked about Salisbury looking at the sights and not seeing them, so deeply were they engaged in talk. What could be more innocent than to walk, talking, about Salisbury? Yet if Stephen, Virginia, or Mrs. Colquhoun had met them they would have been moved by unpleasant emotions. Once during the afternoon this thought crossed Catherine’s mind. It was when, at tea in a confectioner’s, Christopher was holding out a plate of muffins to her, his face the face of a seraph floating in glory; and she took a muffin, and held it suspended while she looked at him, arrested by the thought, and said, ‘Why mayn’t one be happy?’
‘But one may, and one is,’ said Christopher.
‘One is,’ she smiled, ‘but one mayn’t. At least, one mayn’t go on being happy. Not over again. Not in this way. Not——’ she tried to find the words to express it—‘out of one’s turn.’
‘What one’s relations think, or wish, or approve, or deplore,’ said Christopher, who scented Stephen somewhere at the back of her remarks, ‘should never be taken the least notice of if one wishes to go on developing.’
‘Well, I seem to be going on developing at a breakneck rate.’
‘Besides, it’s jealousy. Nearly always. Deep down. The grudge of the half dead against the wholly alive, of the not wanted against the wanted. They can’t manage to be alive themselves, so they declare the only respectable thing is to be dead. The only pure thing. The only holy thing. And they pretend every sort of pious horror if one won’t be dead too. Relations,’ he finished, lighting a cigarette and speaking from the depths of an experience that consisted of one uncle, and he the most amiable and unexacting of men, who never gave advice and never criticised, and only wanted sometimes to be played golf with, ‘are like that. They have to be defied. Or they’ll strangle one.’
‘It seems dangerous,’ said Catherine, pursuing her first thought, ‘to show that one likes anything or anybody very much.’
‘Isn’t it the rankest hypocrisy,’ said Christopher with a face of disgust.
‘If you were bald, and had a long white beard——’ she began. ‘But even then,’ she went on after a pause, ‘if we looked pleased while we talked and seemed very much interested, we’d be done for.’