“Then the devil must help them invent,” said Miss Tibbutt with exceeding firmness.
After dinner they had coffee in the garden. A big moon was coming up in the dusk behind the trees, its light throwing the shadows dark and soft on the grass.
“It’s so astonishingly silent after London,” said Trix, gazing at the blue-grey velvet of the sky.
She looked more than ever elfin-like, with the moonlight falling on her fair hair and pointed oval face, and the shimmering green of her dress.
“I wonder why we ever go to bed on moonlight nights,” she pursued. “Brilliant sunshine always tempts us to do something—a long walk, a drive, or boating on a river. Over and over again we say, ‘Now, the very next fine day we’ll do—so and so.’ But no one ever dreams of saying, ‘Now, the next moonlight night we’ll have a picnic.’ I wonder why not?”
“Because,” said Doctor Hilary smiling, and watching her, “the old and staid folk have no desire to lose their sleep, and—well, the conventions are apt to stand in the way of the young and romantic.”
“Conventions,” sighed Trix, “are the bane of one’s existence. They hamper all one’s most cherished desires until one is of an age when the desires become non-existent. My aunt Lilla is always saying to me, ‘When you’re a much older woman, dearest.’ And I reply, ‘But, Aunt Lilla, now is the moment.’ I know, by experience, later is no good. When I was a tiny child my greatest desire was to play with all the grubbiest children in the parks. Of course I was dragged past them by a haughty and righteous nurse. I can talk to them now if I want to, and even wheel their perambulators. But it would have been so infinitely nicer to wheel a very dirty baby in a very ramshackle perambulator when I was eight. Conventions are responsible for an enormous lot of lost opportunities.”
“Mightn’t they be well lost?” suggested Father Dormer.
Trix looked across at him.
“Serious or nonsense?” she demanded.