"But they don't suffer, or, at any rate, they needn't necessarily. That is where you are so short-sighted. The average woman wants a husband and a child, and I don't see that it matters much whether she has them in the wilderness or in a city; the main thing is to have them."
"Well, for my part," put in Aunt Emily in an aggrieved voice, "if I could only have a man in a cloud of dust I'd sooner never see the species again," which tickled Diana hugely and caused her to horrify her aunt by adding, "But what an advantage for him never to be able to see what you were doing! One could have such high jinks!..." Then, changing her voice subtly, she enquired, "Is it too much for you, aunty?... I mean the dust and the journey? because there must be such very much worse things ahead, and ..."
"That will do, my dear. I can bear it," and her expression of mournful resignation tickled Diana more than ever. On the day before they reached Bulawayo, however, when hour after hour brought very little but scrub and sand, she and her aunt were very nervy and irritable, and only Meryl, with her dreams and ideals, continued quietly interested. When they reached Bulawayo matters did not improve much, because a sand-storm was blowing and it was almost impossible to go out. Mr. Pym packed them off to the Victoria Falls as soon as possible, and remained behind himself to complete the arrangements for his trip. On the further railway journey the dust was worse than ever, and utterly out of heart with everything Rhodesian, Aunt Emily retired to a suite of rooms at the hotel on their arrival and said she should stay there until the cool of the evening.
So Diana and Meryl stood on Danger Point alone, when they took their first long look at the amazing cataract of waters. Neither spoke for many seconds, and then Diana breathed, "I'm glad Aunt Emily didn't come. She would have called it 'lovely' or 'sweet.'"
Meryl laid a sympathetic hand on her arm and murmured, "And you?..."
"One couldn't call it anything. It just is." And Meryl with her understanding heart pressed her arm in silence.
They walked together through the rain forest, getting drenched with spray and hardly noticing it, until they came to the opening near the Devil's Cataract at the south end, and sat down to gaze at the splendour and wonder outspread.
Then Diana spoke a little in something of an undertone, half to Meryl, half to the air:
"A god did it. I don't know which—Jupiter or Pan, or Apollo or Hercules—and when they grew tired of the earth and went off to other planets, they just left it behind as a child might a castle he has built in the sand; and by and by some crabs crawled along and found the castle, and sat down and looked at it because it seemed to them so wonderful; and by and by some humans found the gods' waterfall, crawled up to it, and sat down and wondered. That's all there is to do. O, Meryl, I wish I were a goddess and not a worm. The waters are mocking us. Don't you hear them?... I just feel as if there were something about it all I can't bear."
Meryl smiled a little tender smile. To her Diana in all her moods was adorable. In her shy, fierce, tense ones, as now, she was best of all.