Elizabeth’s eyes twinkled. She liked the speech. It was in this fashion, so we are told, that God regarded His Creation,—that is before Mother Eve, beguiled by the old Serpent, had upset matters. Yet after all, in spite of his upsettings, there are times and places which yet fill us with some faint sense of that pristine perfection.
Of course Elizabeth knew perfectly well who he was. That may well go without saying. But, in spite of John having said that he was a decent fellow, he wasn’t in the remotest degree like her mental conception of him.
She had pictured him a big man—which he truly was, also a bluff man, a jovial man, a talker, a bit loud-voiced, perhaps a trifle assertive, at all events very confident of himself, and all these things he was not. It had not taxed Elizabeth’s intuition very vastly to perceive that, contrary to all her expectations, there was an extraordinary diffidence about him. He wasn’t the least certain of himself, he wasn’t the least jovial nor loud-voiced, while something in his eyes,—well, I have mentioned his eyes before. Somehow Elizabeth’s mind swung to her little dusty-haired, grey-eyed Patrick in Ireland. She saw him in the throes of grappling with one of those world problems to which the cleverest of us can find but a poor answer, heard a small voice say wearily:
“Mummy, there is some things what is very difficult to understand.”
Of course it was an absurd comparison. What had this big man in common with the perplexities of a childish mind? Nevertheless for a brief space she had thought of Patrick.
“You can almost,” said Elizabeth, “see the Good Folk come trooping down that hill.
“Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushing glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men;