“And I,” cried Bardek, back into French. “I? With one little jump—so!—I could hop over the stars! Come!”
He tucked her arm in his and marched out, singing of Le Roi D’ Yvetot, that jolly old king who lived in a mud hut, went to bed early, and got up late, who didn’t care a fippence for fame or reputation; his crown was a cotton cap and his sole bodyguard a lazy hound.
Through the orchard they trudged, both joining in the laughing chorus,
Oh! oh! oh! oh! ah! ah! ah! ah!
Quel bon petit roi c’était là là! là!
Oh! oh! oh! oh ah! ah! ah! ah!
Quel bon petit roi c’était là là! là!
XVIII
A PARABLE OF IGNORANCE
THAT night Gorgas wrote a long letter to Allen Blynn. It was so unlike the usual stilted newsletters that it made him wonder. The transition between childlike scraps of information and a flowing, spirited communication, was absolutely abrupt, as if she had been holding herself back all this while—as in reality she had done—assuming a naïveté not natural. This letter was a splendid personal outpouring; it did not contain a single reference to the doings of social Mount Airyites.
The theme was, Woman and her desire to be a free, untrammeled spirit, to express herself in work and play, to let develop whatever was within, not caring what happens. She wished she had the courage to give herself free rein, she told him, to be able not to care about the opinions of others, a crushing force, and so find out what were her possibilities. All personal development, all development of peoples, is a revolt and a demand for the right to grow. It is they who “give in” who eventually give up and become stamped with the mark of a caste. One must have room to expand, even if one smashes the receptacle which holds things together. In such broad generalization she summed up her view.