"Really a most remarkable individual, my dear," said the Professor, for a man who could do all the varied things his host could, and yet have the brains and taste to collect such books as the Professor had been gloating over, was not to be met above once in a lifetime. "In his case, success is not due to his wealth."
"In spite of it, you mean!" cried Gay. "If it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, it's a million times more difficult for him to live his own life, act up to his ideals, and fulfil the genius that is in him. The world won't let him as a rule."
"And to think that such a man as that should keep Trotters!" said the Professor, who, if he thought at all of what Gay had been doing that glorious June afternoon, concluded that she had enthused over something a trifle better than the weedy specimens he had seen at Waterloo Park.
But Gay sat very still, thinking. She had found herself admitted to a paradise hitherto undreamed of; it was as if, seeking a single diamond, she had found a Golconda, and something of Chris's passion for horses had been breathed into her ... they were so much, much more beautiful than humans, more clever even in some respects ... with one-half of her soul she worshipped, with the other half feared them, as the real rivals to her happiness.
CHAPTER XXV
THE TUG-OF-WAR
Chris looked very white and thin, but just as smart as ever, and completely unsubdued in spirit and intention, when he called in Connaught Square one afternoon late in May, and found Gay in.
She looks prettier than ever, he thought, if less rounded than of yore, and if he had expressed sorrow at causing her so much pain, Gay's tender heart would instantly have melted, but for all his delight at seeing her, his evident determination to treat his accident as a trifle not worth talking about, put her back up to begin with. And when he unblushingly asked her to condole with him on the number of good things he had missed, and roundly abused the Professor and his understudy, for refusing him permission to ride with an arm strapped to his side, Gay's patience gave way utterly, and the first little rift within the lute made itself known.
Poor Chris felt that coldness in the air, but had not the key to the puzzle, and he could not make Gay out. Instead of the jolly little girl, eager to hear all about his stable, to discuss his horses, his hopes and future chances, to buck him up as she had so often done when things went wrong, she did not seem to have a word to throw to him except about trivial matters that didn't in the least interest him—or her, formerly.
How could he tell that those moments in which she saw his colours closed in by a mêlée of struggling horses and men, had changed her from a careless, happy-go-lucky girl, who laughed at accidents, had scarcely flung a fear even to death, to a thoughtful woman whose outlook on life would never again be quite the same? In a word, what he did before had not mattered, but now that she knew she loved him, it did, yet this solution never occurred to him, nor was there anything in her manner to suggest it—quite the reverse, in fact.