“I shall be there to-morrow night, and Sunday, and for one long week at least. Hamley is the centre of the world, the axle of the universe—you shall see. You doubt it?” he added, with a whimsical smile.
“I shall dispute most of what you say, and all that you think, if you do not continue to use the Quaker ‘thee’ and ‘thou’—ungrammatical as you are so often.”
“Thee is now the only person in London, or in England, with whom I use ‘thee’ and ‘thou.’ I am no longer my own master, I am a public servant, and so I must follow custom.”
“It is destructive of personality. The ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ belong to you. I wonder if the people of Hamley will say ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ to me. I hope, I do hope they will.”
“Thee may be sure they will. They are no respecters of persons there. They called your husband’s father Robert—his name was Robert. Friend Robert they called him, and afterwards they called him Robert Denton till he died.”
“Will they call me Hylda?” she asked, with a smile. “More like they will call thee Friend Hylda; it sounds simple and strong,” he replied.
“As they call Claridge Pasha Friend David,” she answered, with a smile. “David is a good name for a strong man.”
“That David threw a stone from a sling and smote a giant in the forehead. The stone from this David’s sling falls into the ocean and is lost beneath the surface.”
His voice had taken on a somewhat sombre tone, his eyes looked away into the distance; yet he smiled too, and a hand upon his knee suddenly closed in sympathy with an inward determination.
A light of understanding came into her face. They had been keeping things upon the surface, and, while it lasted, he seemed a lesser man than she had thought him these past years. But now—now there was the old unschooled simplicity, the unique and lonely personality, the homely soul and body bending to one root-idea, losing themselves in a wave of duty. Again he was to her, once more, the dreamer, the worker, the conqueror—the conqueror of her own imagination. She had in herself the soul of altruism, the heart of the crusader. Touched by the fire of a great idea, she was of those who could have gone out into the world without wallet or scrip, to work passionately for some great end.