As though in complete sympathy with the cause of reform, running water seemed to follow him about automatically. Whatever haphazard portion of country they rambled, the persistent brook appeared like an obedient servant on command. Deb began to wish her education were completed; the weather might any day turn chill and dreary. With this in mind, she perched upon a couple of rickety boards which roughly bridged a sparkle of narrow river, and shamelessly determined to put forth her powers to exact forthwith the inevitable proposal, and thus be through with it.
She had not the same compunction in dealing with Samson Phillips that might have wrung her had he been the good-natured, faithful type of fool she had at first imagined him. The man had revealed himself a fanatic, whose gospel was Simple Goodness; but who in preaching it materialized its intangible fragrance as of garnered apples, into a quality of cold iron; forbidding, repellant. High-principled he certainly was, but intolerantly throned and totally without forgiveness. He would have made martyrs where he could not make converts. He destroyed Simple Goodness, in his harsh advocacy, as he had destroyed the beauty of running water, by letting it serve as object-lesson.
On this berry and bronze morning of October, Deb opposed to him a dancing elfin mood that was far more nimbly in accord with the tags of fluttering colour blown from the trees into the eddies of writhing silver, with the jolly boisterous hedges, all aflame and a-prickle, a blaze of hips and haws webbed in the powdery tangle of old-man’s-beard—Deb was more wickedly and wantonly a part of such a morning as this, kicking her legs to and fro from the plank which spanned the water, than Samson with all his most complacent hopes for her betterment and cure could have deemed possible.
“This is how I like to see you looking,” he said, lying full length on the bank, and smiling lazily across at her. “Come, now, isn’t it better than studios?”
“Supposing a girl should marry a man”—(“and I don’t see why he shouldn’t do some mathematics for a change,” reflected Deb)—“Supposing a girl should marry a man, and the man had different tastes from the girl, about studios and nature, you know, and they had two children——” Samson turned his head away, and nibbled grass—“and both had the same tastes as either one of the parents, ought the other to give up his or her own feelings about things or force them on the children, supposing he or she to be sure his or her ways were the best?”
And she waited solemnly for him to work it out.
He won respect by neither flinching nor compromising. “A man should never allow his children to be brought up away from Nature, whatever they may want themselves.”
“Yes”—straddling the plank so as to face him—“but isn’t what they want themselves, Nature? And if it isn’t natural for them to want Nature——”
“Then they are unnatural children,” said Samson, stamping with firm boots on his mythical offspring.
Deb’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. Fancy had quickened into momentary life a pair of baby creatures like herself, eager for bright, useless toys, perversely breaking them at each fresh disappointment ... her children, pressed and wrenched into the pattern their inflexible father judged best for them....