“Little beside all those high brick walls and wings and windows of the old Wastewater,” she countered. “Poor unhappy Wastewater!” she said more than once, as they walked slowly about, in the increasing warmth of the day. “Sic semper tyrannis!” And she touched the neatly ranked bricks with a gentle hand. “We could build ten houses, couldn’t we?”
“You will have enough bricks there to do everything you ever want to—walls, bath-houses, paths, new buildings,” David assured her.
Gabrielle had picked a plume of purple lilac; she slowly twirled it and sniffed it as they walked. The late morning was so still that they could hear an occasional distant cock-crow. Silence, fragrance, and the sweetness of expanding life lay upon the world like a spell.
“Do you see that angle of land there,” the girl asked, presently, when with their lunch basket they were going toward the shore, “there, just beyond the spit, with its own little curve of bay? That never seemed quite to belong to the rest of the place.”
“You could sell it,” David suggested, catching her firm hand in his as she cautiously followed him down the rocky path.
“Oh, no! I don’t mean that. But you see what a cunning little homestead it would make all by itself,” Gabrielle said, making her way to their old favourite spot and beginning the preparations for a little driftwood fire. “It has good trees, and that line of silver birches, and it has dogwoods. I was wondering if Tom and Sylvia wouldn’t like a house there all their own—no responsibility, a place they could shut up and leave when they wanted to wander.”
“Then they are not going to live with her,” David thought, with his heart sinking again.
She had been talking about them in a desultory fashion all morning, but when the coffee was boiling, and the buns toasted, and the chops dripping and sizzling, she settled herself back comfortably against the rocks, and gave him the story consecutively.
“Sylvia is a changed person in lots of ways,” said Gay, with relish. “And in other ways she is exactly what she always was and always will be. She has the—you take cream, David?—she has the family pride. Only it takes a rather nice form with her, the form of self-respect. Sylvia must—she simply must respect herself. And after poor Aunt Flora died, what with having lost her fortune and then having to bear what she considered—and what really was!—a terrible blow to her pride, poor Sylvia really suffered terribly. She kept trying to analyse how she felt, and convince me about it, and I know that’s what made her ill. She couldn’t quite get used to not being—what shall I call it?—admirable, superb, superior—that was always my old word for her.
“She talked about college courses, and I think she must have written the Dean about it, but perhaps she wasn’t much encouraged. After all, Sylvia’s only twenty-two, and perhaps professors have to be a little older.