"Oh, Reggie, how silly you are! Isn't he absurd, Mr. Wildacre?"
"Please don't call me Mr. Wildacre, it makes me feel a hundred, and an enemy at that. Call me Frank, and in return I'll call Sir Reginald any name you like. And now, Sir Reginald, please tell us why you think your pilgrims had more fun in the long run than my legions?"
"Simply because their run was so much longer, and so could hold so much more. You admit that the adventure of the legions consisted in their anticipations of seeing and possessing a new country; but I maintain that the adventure on which the pilgrims had embarked included not only a new country, but a new heaven and a new earth. The Pilgrims' Way was not merely the way to Canterbury: it was the way, via Canterbury, to the New Jerusalem."
The mocking grey eyes suddenly grew thoughtful. "I see what you are driving at, Sir Reginald. You are thinking of all that the pilgrimage stood for rather than of just the pilgrimage itself."
"Of course I am. And to find the true value of anything, you must think of all that it stands for rather than of the thing itself. The Crown of England means more than the bejewelled head-gear which is kept in a glass case in the Tower; the colours of a regiment are not valued at the rate of so much per yard of tattered silk; and a wedding-ring means far more to a woman than an ounce or so of twenty-two carat gold."
"Are wedding-rings made of twenty-two carat gold?" asked Annabel in her unquenchable thirst for information; "I thought eighteen carat was the purest gold ever used."
"So it is for ordinary jewellery," explained Arthur; "but wedding-rings, I have always heard, are made of twenty-two carat. At least that is what is generally believed; but I cannot say whether it is more than a tradition, like the idea that the sun will put a fire out."
"But is that only a tradition?" Annabel asked. "I always pull the blinds down when the sunshine falls on the fire, for fear of putting it out."
"For fear of putting which out," I inquired, "the sunshine or the fire?"
"The fire, of course. How could anything put the sunshine out, Reggie? How silly you are!"