BOOK II
THE FEATHER BED
CHAPTER I
KATHERINE IN LOVE
Katherine Trenchard, although she had, for a number of years now, gone about the world with open eyes and an understanding heart, was, in very many ways, absurdly old-fashioned. I say “absurd” because many people, from amongst her own Trenchard relations, thought her prejudices, simplicities, and confidences absurd, and hoped that she would grow out of them. The two people who really knew her, her Uncle Timothy and Rachel Seddon, hoped that she never would. Her “old-fashioned” habits of mind led her to believe in “people” in “things” and in “causes”, and it was her misfortune that up to this year of which I am speaking she had never been disappointed. That may be because she had grown up amongst the rocks, the fields, the lanes of Glebeshire, true ground where sincerity and truth flourish yet in abundance—moreover it is assured that man lives up to the qualities with which he is by his friends credited, and all the Trenchard family lived up to Katherine’s belief in their word of honour.
She was not so simple a character that she found the world perfect, but she was in no way subtle, and, because she herself acted in her faults and virtues, her impetuosities and repentances, her dislikes and affections with clear-hearted simplicity, she believed that other persons did the same. Her love for her mother was of this quite unquestioning sort; her religion too was perfectly direct and unquestioning: so, then, her love for Philip....
She had never before been in love, nor had she ever considered men very closely as anything but visitors or relations. The force and power of the passion that now held her was utterly removed from anything that had ever encountered her before, but she was a strong character, and her simplicity of outlook helped her. Philip seemed to her to be possessed of all the qualities of the perfect hero. His cleverness, his knowledge of the world, his humour were only balanced by his kindness to everyone and everything, his unselfishness, his honesty of speech and eye. She had thought him, once, a little weak in his anxiety to be liked by all the world, but now that was forgotten. He was, during these days, a perfect character.
She had not, however, lost her clear-sighted sense of humour; that humour was almost cynical sometimes in its sharp perception of people and things, and did not seem to belong to the rest of Katherine at all. It was driven more often upon herself than upon anyone else, but it was, for a character of Katherine’s simplicity, strangely sharp. A fair field for the employment of it was offered to her just now in the various attitudes and dispositions of her own immediate family, but, as yet, she was unable to see the family at all, so blinding was Philip’s radiance.
That year England enjoyed one of the old romantic Christmases. There were sparkling dazzling frosts. The snow lay hard and shining under skies of unchanging blue, and on Christmas Eve, when the traffic and smoke of the town had stolen the purity away, more snow fell and restored it again.
It had always been the rule that the Trenchards should spend Christmas in Glebeshire, but, this year, typhoid fever had visited Garth only a month or two before, and London was held to be safer. Katherine had not had, in her life, so many entertainments that she could afford to be blasé about them, and she still thought a Pantomime splendid, “The Only Way” certainly the most magnificent play in the world, and a dance a thing of perfect rapture, if only she could be more secure about the right shapes and colours of her clothes. She had no vanity whatever—indeed a little more would have helped her judgment: she never knew whether a dress would suit her, nor why it was that one thing “looked right” and another thing “looked wrong”. Millie could have helped her, because Millie knew all about clothes, but it was always a case with Katherine of something else coming first, of having to dress at the last minute, of “putting on any old thing because there was no time.”