“Oh, poor dear!” she said to herself, and then she uttered aloud: “Now, look here, Toto, it’s understood once and for all that I’m ready to live with you to-day. But I won’t marry you. If I go with you now, there’s to be no more talking about that.”
“Oh, that’s understood,” he said.
“Well, then,” she replied, and she unfolded her white sunshade, “let’s go and see what we find beneath the weathercock and she put her hand on his arm.”
They strolled slowly down the turf. She was used enough to his method of waiting, as if for the psychological moment, to begin a conversation of importance, and for quite a long way they talked gaily and pleasantly of the little herbs of which, as they got farther inland, they discovered their carpet to be composed— the little mints, the little yellow blossoms, the tiny, silvery leaves like ferns—and the quiet and the thrilling of the innumerable larks. The wind seemed to move low down and cool about their feet.
And she said that he didn’t know what it meant to her to be back—just in the quiet.
“Over there,” she said, “it did seem to be rather dreadful—rather comfortless, and even a little useless. It wasn’t that they hadn’t got the things. Why, there are bits in Philadelphia and bits round Philadelphia—old bits and old families and old people. There are even grass and flowers and shade. But somehow, what was dreadful, what made it so lonely, was that they didn’t know what they were there for. It was as if no one knew—what he was there for. I don’t know.”
She stopped for a minute.
“I don’t know,” she said—“I don’t know how to express it. Over here things seem to fit in, if it’s only a history that they fit into. They go on. But over there one went on patching up people—we patched them up by the score, by the hundred. And then they went and did it all over again, and it seemed as if we only did it for the purpose of letting them go and do it all over again. It was as if instead of preparing them for life we merely prepared them for new breakdowns.”
“Well, I suppose life isn’t very well worth living over there?” Grimshaw asked.
“Oh, it isn’t the life,” she said. “The life’s worth living—more worth living than it is here.... But there’s something more than mere life. There’s—you might call it the overtone of life—the something that’s more than the mere living. It’s the what gives softness to our existence that they haven’t got. It’s the ... That’s it! It’s knowing one’s place; it’s feeling that one’s part of a tradition, a link in the chain. And oh ...” she burst out, “I didn’t want to talk about it. But it used to come over me like a fearful doubt—the thought that I, too, might be growing into a creature without a place. That’s why it’s heaven to be back,” she ended. She looked down the valley with her eyes half closed, she leant a little on his arm. “It’s heaven, heaven!” she repeated in a whisper.