“Find themselves being regarded with much very genuine liking and friendship by those to whom they are good enough to give their company,” Mosscrop finished the sentence for her. He smiled to himself as he pressed her arm still more closely. The girl was not accustomed to drink, and the Capri and maraschino had gone to her tongue. He was pleasantly conscious of their influences himself, and upon second thought he liked his companion all the more for the innocent fearlessness with which she had followed his example. The charm of the whole experience strengthened its hold upon him. He looked down with tenderness upon her. “Yes, very genuine friendship—and gratitude,” he reiterated, with ardour in his low voice.
She did not conceal the enjoyment she had in both look and tone. “The idea of real companionship is so precious in my eyes,” she murmured—“a true communion of minds. There is nothing else in life worth living for. Do you think there can be any real friendship without genuine intellectual respect?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t lay too much stress on that myself,” he answered, lightly. “I find that the fellows I really like the most—the men that I take the most solid comfort in putting in time with—are tremendous duffers from any intellectual point of view, but of course”—he found himself hastily adding—“that is among men. I have never known anything at all about women friends—that is, of what one may honestly call friends. But I am learning fast. I have reached the point of forming an ideal: she must be tall, with her hat just brushing above my collar. She must have the most wonderful pale yellow hair in the world, and the prettiest face, and new French boots—and——”
“You don’t care in the least what kind of a mind she has,” put in Vestalia, dolefully.
“Ah, you didn’t let me finish. She will have a spirit brave and yet tender, a mind broad and capable yet without arrogance, a temperament attuning itself to each passing mood, sunny, shadowed, merry, pensive, adventurous, timid—all as full of sweet little turns and twists and unexpected things in general as an April day. I don’t want her learned: I should hate her to be logical. I like her just as she is: I wouldn’t have her changed for the world.”
In details the definition perhaps left something to be desired. But its form of presentation brought a flush of satisfaction to Ves-talia’s cheek. She nestled closer still against his shoulder for a dozen paces or so, and when she drew away then, let him feel that it was because they were at Oxford Street, and for no other reason.
“Oh, the beautiful day!” was all she said.
They turned to the right, and sauntered aimlessly along down the broad pavement, pausing now and again to glance over some tradesman’s display, then drifting onward again, close together. Before a bookseller’s window at a corner they made a more considerable halt. Mosscrop scanned the rows of titles minutely, talking as he did so. Thus between comments on the volumes they looked at, and idle remarks on subjects which these suggested, she picked up this further account of her new friend’s affairs.
“I told you I was a Scotchman,” he said. “I was the son of a factor, a sort of steward over a biggish estate, and I never did anything but go to school from the earliest moment I can remember. It is as if I was born in a class-room, and cradled on a blackboard. It is a terrible land for that; tuition broods over it like a pestilence. Their idea is to make of each child’s brain a sort of intellectual haggis; the more different kinds of stuff there are in it, the greater the fame of the teacher and the pride of the parents. I shudder now when I think how much I knew at the age of twelve. As for my eighteenth year, when I took the Strathbogie exhibition, Confucius, John Knox, and Lord Bacon rolled in one would have been frightened of me. My information was appalling. My mother died from sheer excess of astonishment at having given birth to such a prodigy. My father took to drink. The magnificence of my attainments not only threw him off his balance—it debauched the entire district. It is the law of history, you know, that communities and nations progress to a certain point, achieve some crowning deed in a golden age of splendid productiveness, and then wither and go off to seed. Well, my parish, having produced me, reached its climax. Industry flagged, enterprise died down; the very land ceased to grow as much corn to the acre as formerly. The people could do nothing but congregate at the taverns and discuss with bated breath my meteoric progress across the academic heavens. Oh, I was a most remarkable young man!
“It happened that there was also a remarkable old man in my neighbourhood. He came from nobody in particular, and went away young. People had long since forgotten that there had been such a lad, when one day he returned to us, well along in years, and infamously rich. I don’t mean that he had come wrongfully by his money. God knows how he got it; the story ran that it had something to do with smoked fish. Whatever its source, his wealth was wanton, preposterous, criminal in its dimensions. He had no kith or kin remaining to him. Of course we knew he would build and endow an educational establishment. All rich old Scotchmen do that, as an ordinary matter. They have reared for us such myriads of brand-new colleges and seminaries on every hillside that I marvel even the rabbits and pheasants can escape learning to spell. There are logarithms in the very atmosphere.