Then, laughing again, she asked, “What church do you go to, on Sundays, Doctor Pryne? Not one built by men, any more than I, I’m sure. You too are beyond that kindergarten point in evolution. You see, I know you much better than you can even begin to know me, for I have read your books!”
Good Lord! What had Lewis’ books to say of his religion? They were austerely psychological, made up of the findings and the theories of a practising psychiatrist. The philosophical humility in all his writing was Lewis’ pride. But he was saved the trouble of defending his pride just then, even if he had thought it worth the trouble, for Clare’s stepdaughter, Petra, had come down the terrace steps and was hurrying across the lawn.
“Imagine Clare calling herself the mother of that!” Dick laughed—and Lewis, somehow, knew that the remark and its accompanying mirth was probably as familiar at this tea table as was Clare’s explanation of her individualistic out-of-doors worship.
Clare murmured hurriedly, softly—her fingers just touching Lewis’ coat sleeve as she leaned toward him—“Richard is only teasing me. He knows perfectly well that I’m not flattered. I am thirty years old and have no ambition to compete with Petra’s lovely youth. What I long to be is a mother to her, a real one. How I long for it! But I need your help, Doctor Pryne. You will see how I need it....”
Petra, when she reached the shade of the elm, was constrained and even a little awkward. But that was hardly surprising. All three of them had watched her approach from the instant that she had come down the terrace steps, and she might very well have felt that Clare’s murmurings in Lewis’ ear, and even more, Dick’s laugh, concerned herself.
“Darling!” Clare exclaimed, smiling up at her through her really fascinating lashes. “What a perfectly enchanting frock! It’s new! And you never showed it to me! And look at me! I haven’t even changed!—This is my daughter, grown up, since you saw her, Doctor Pryne. Sit down quickly, darling. It’s too hot to keep the men standing. And here’s the tea. Draw your chairs to the table.—You needn’t stay to pass things, Elise.” She threw a warm, grateful smile to the maid who had brought out the tray. The look she won in return was humbly idolizing.
Lewis held a chair out for Petra, and when she took it, drew his own along beside it.
The gawky schoolgirl body had rounded into selfconscious maturity. Otherwise Petra was exactly the girl of Lewis’, in this case strangely explicit, memory ... until she turned from him and the intense gentian blue of her eyes no longer blurred his power for deeper perception. Then he saw that the attentive fairy-tale gaze was quite gone; or if there was attentiveness there now, it was not bent on a happy, mystery-brimmed world before the girl’s face, but on a realm within. Childlike receptiveness was transformed to a look of reserve made vivid. The utter beauty of the remembered child face was there—intact—but it no longer took one’s breath; it was protected by this vivid reserve as by a sword, on guard.
But Lewis was not sorry for the sword. He saw that it would, at any rate, keep her safe from Clare. He knew that Youth often has need of its seeming hardness until years give it some chance to acquire a little subtlety in its denials, if it is to protect with any success the inner, personal development of its own integrity.
Lewis took the teacup and saucer Clare handed him. He helped himself to toast and strawberry jam. He laughed, amusedly, at some remark or other of “Richard’s,” and could even have repeated the witticism word for word if it had been required of him. But in spite of all this overt conformity to the social requirements of those first minutes since Petra’s arrival under the elm and his holding her chair for her, he was conscious of one thing only, the young girl’s living, breathing, still self, there at his side.