Ten Degrees Backward

by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

"I don't recognise any difference at all," said I, taking up the cudgels on Fay's behalf. "I cannot see that the bloom is in any way rubbed off the idiot by Fay's using the expression instead of Frank."

"But it is different, Reggie. There is a difference between boys and girls, whether you see it or not. I can quite understand that, as Frank and Fay are so much alike, they seem to you like the same person. But they are not really the same, and I am surprised at your stupidity in thinking that they are."

Annabel might marvel at my obtuseness, but not more than I marvelled at hers.

Fay bent low over St. Etheldreda's petticoats, but not low enough to prevent my seeing that she did so in order to hide a smile, which smile, to my disgust, brought the blood into my cheeks as if I had been a raw youth of seventeen instead of an avuncular person of forty-two.

"Come out into the garden, Fay," I said, hopping down from my perch upon Mount Ararat in a feeble attempt to cover my infantile confusion; "it is a shame to spend St. Luke's summer in the atmosphere of St. James's unbleached shirts."

Annabel corrected me. "It isn't St. Luke's summer yet, Reggie—not till the 15th. And I cannot possibly leave the house until all the Guild things are properly sorted; but young people need more fresh air than people of our age do; so if you like to take Fay out for a little walk, I will ring for Ponty and one of the housemaids to come and help me in apportioning the garments."

"All right; come along, Fay, and take what fresh air your youth needs," I said rather grimly; "or else Annabel and I shall be summoned by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children."

I was furious with myself for blushing, and just a little—a very little—furious with Fay for smiling so as to make me blush; for although I had been mad enough to fall in love with a girl twenty-four years younger than myself, I had no intention of being selfish enough to ask that girl to marry me and hamper her youth with my crabbed age. Therefore I had made up my mind to keep my love to myself, and not to let Fay guess that I regarded her save in the avuncular fashion that Annabel had ordained for me. Madly in love though I was, I had still sense enough left to see that youth must mate with youth, and that it would be impossible for a girl of eighteen to love a man of forty-two as a woman ought to love her husband. But I knew that Fay was attached to me, and I felt that there was just a possibility—though hardly a probability—that she might, in her youth and inexperience, mistake that niecely devotion for something warmer. Therefore I felt bound in honour to save her from herself, in the unlikely event of her imagining herself in love with me. And I thought that the best way of doing this was to support Annabel's fiction of my own avuncular attitude of mind and heart.

But that smile which had endeavoured to hide itself in St. Etheldreda's petticoats raised a doubt in my mind as to the efficacy of my disguise; whilst the ridiculous blush on my part, which had arisen out of the smile, showed me that the garment of friendship, in which I had wrapped myself, needed a considerable amount of repair. So I thought that the time had arrived for that necessary evil which Annabel described as "a word in season."

"I don't wish to give credit where credit is not due," I said, following Fay into the garden and walking by her side along the denuded pergola; "and if Annabel says this isn't St. Luke's summer, of course it isn't. But whatever saint is responsible for it I must say he has done his work well, for a better imitation of an ordinary and garden summer I never saw."