“I know, but I tell you, as soon as I saw old Dick I knew that I couldn’t lecture him, one can’t change.... I can’t help being the same sort of person with him I’ve always been. But I really am most awfully sorry about it all—the old blackguard!”
“Well, if you hear that we are ruined, perhaps you’ll be sorrier still.”
“That won’t happen—no tragedies ever happen to any one who has anything to do with me—ha! ha! They couldn’t, could they, Teresa? I’m much too——”
“Hush!” said the Doña sharply, suddenly noticing the presence of Teresa; and, with a look of extreme relief, Hugh slunk through the French window into the garden.
So the Doña had actually been trying to turn Hugh into their father’s mentor! It was not like her; she was much too wise not to know that the incorrigibly frivolous Hugh was quite unsuited to the part.
Parallel with the infallible wisdom that is the fruit of our own personal experience, there lie the waste products of the world’s experience—facile generalisations, clichés, and so on. Half the follies of mankind are due to forming our actions along this line instead of along the other. There, Dick and Hugh were not two human beings, therefore unique and inimitable, but ‘old school friends’—and to whose gentle pressure back to the narrow way is one more likely to yield than to that of an ‘old school friend’?
But the very fact of the wise Doña acquiescing in such a stale fallacy, told of desperation and the clutching at straws.
Of course, Hugh was perfectly right—the shape and colour of his relationship with Dick had been fixed fifty years ago at the dame’s school in Kensington, to spring up unchanged all through the years at each fresh meeting. They could not change it; why, you might as well go and tell an oak that this spring it was to weave its leaves on the loom of the elms.
He had been right, too, in saying there would be no catastrophe. The fate of Pompeii—a sudden melodramatic blotting out of little familiar things—would never, she felt sure, overtake Plasencia. Things at Plasencia happened very slowly, by means of a long series of anticlimaxes.