“Come, now!” said Gerald, “a mistress of that size would be unsuitable. Charms of so diffuse an acreage would create, even in a god, a sense of inadequacy. Nevertheless, I am falling rather ardently in love with those two hills. I begin to adore the casual play of lights and shadows upon yonder piled-up dirt, which when seen from any other station than this would not in the least resemble a woman. And such amorous notions, apart from their insanity, are not befitting in a contentedly, if temporarily, married person.”
The transience of his comforts made them very dear. It was well worth the inconvenience of sleeping in his spectacles (as Gerald, for his own reasons, did) so that in the night season he could awaken, to see Maya’s tranquil brown head yonder beside the smaller and tousled and livelily red head of Theodorick Quentin Musgrave,—both visible yonder because of the lamp which the child demanded at night, and because of his insistence that Mother was to sleep with him instead of with Father.
Outside, Gerald would hear those of his transformed predecessors who now were horses, shuffling and restively stamping, and at times snorting and whinnying, in the chill outer darkness; or a misguided gentleman who lived nowadays as a steer would low, much farther off; or Gerald would hear yet another one of Maya’s former husbands coughing, with the far-reaching and morose scornfulness peculiar to a sheep. And then the difference between the estate of Gerald’s predecessors and the snug warmth of his so comfortable soft bed, and his knowledge of that unmarred bodily ease which, just now, was his through every hour of the day, would trouble Gerald, because he knew it all to be so satisfying and so transient.
PART TEN
THE BOOK OF ENDINGS
“Trust Nobody but Thyself, and
None Other will Betray Thee.”