“Bosh!” exclaimed Miss Raybold. “Do you really think I must leave this camp at the dictation of that person?”
“’Scuse me,” said Mrs. Perkenpine, “but I’m goin’ to scratch things together for movin’. We’ll have dinner here, and then we’ll pack up and be off as soon as the carts come. That’s what Phil says he’s goin’ to do.”
With a satisfied mind and internal gratitude to Mrs. Perkenpine, who had made everything easy for him, the bishop endeavored to make Corona feel that, as her departure from the camp was inevitable, it would be well not to disturb her mind too much about it. But it was of no use trying to console the lady.
“It is too bad,” she said; “it is humiliating. Here I believed that I was truly myself; that I was an independent entity; that I was free to assert my individual nature and to obey its impulses, and now I find that I am nothing but the slave of a female guide. Actually I must obey her, and I must conform to her!”
“It is true,” said the bishop, musingly, “that although we may discover ourselves, and be greatly pleased with the prospect of what we see, we may not be permitted to enter into its enjoyment, and must content ourselves with looking over the fence and longing for what we see.”
Corona faintly smiled. “When we have climbed high enough to see over that fence,” she said, “it becomes our duty to break it down.”
“When I was in England,” said the bishop, “I saw a fence—an oak fence—which they told me had stood for four hundred years. It looked awfully tough, and it now reminds me of some of the manners and customs of civilization.”
“When you were in England,” said Corona, “did you visit Newnham College?”
He never had. But she told him that she had been there for two years. “And now,” she continued, “there may be time enough before I must pack up my effects to finish what I was going to say to you about approximate assimilations.”