"Licked as clean as the back of your hand," Honoria replied, warming to her subject. "They hardly repaid felling for firewood. It made me wretched. Some idiot threw down a match, I suppose. There had been nearly a month's drought, and the whole place was like so much tinder. There was an easterly breeze too. You can imagine the blaze! We hadn't the faintest chance. Poor, old Iles lost his head completely, and sat down with his feet in a dry ditch and wept. There must be over two hundred acres of it. It's a dreadful eyesore, perfectly barren and useless, but for a little sour grass even a gipsy's donkey has to be hard up before he cares to eat!"—Miss St. Quentin shifted her position with a certain impatience. "I can't bear to see the land doing no work," she said.
"Doing no work?" Dickie inquired. He began to be interested in the conversation from other than a purely practical and local standpoint.
"Of course," she asserted. "The land has no more right to lie idle than any of the rest of us—unless it's a bit of tilth sweetening in fallow between two crops. That is reasonable enough. But for the rest," she said, a certain brightness and self-forgetting gaining on her—"let it contribute its share all the while, like an honest citizen of the universe. Let it work, most decidedly let it work."
"And what about such trifles as the few hundred square miles of desert or mountain range?" Richard inquired, half amused, half—and that rather unwillingly—charmed. "They are liable to be a thorn in the side of the—well, socialist."
"Oh, I've no quarrel with them. They come under a different head."—Honoria's manner had ceased to be in any degree embarrassed, though a slight perplexity came into her expression. For just then she remembered, somehow, her pacings of the station platform at Culoz, the salutation of the bleak, pure, evening wind from out the fastnesses of the Alps, and all her conversation there with her faithful admirer, Ludovic Quayle. And it occurred to her what singular contrast in sentiment that bleak evening wind offered to the mild, moist, westerly wind—complaint of the homeless baby, Spring—which had just now cried against her bosom! And again Honoria became conscious of being in contact, both in herself and in her surroundings, with more coercing, more vital drama than she could either interpret or place. Again something of fear invaded her, to combat which she hurried into speech.—"No, I haven't any quarrel with deserts and so on," she repeated. "They're uncommonly useful things for mankind to knock its head against—invincible, unnegotiable, splendidly competent to teach humanity its place. You see we've grown not a little conceited—so at least it seems to me—on our evolutionary journey up from the primordial cell. We're too much inclined to forget we've developed soul quite comparatively recently, and, therefore, that there is probably just as long a journey ahead of us—before we reach the ultimate of intellectual and spiritual development—as there is behind us physically from, say the parent ascidian, to you and me. And—and somehow"—Honoria's voice had become full and sweet, and she looked straight at Dickie with a rare candour and simplicity—"somehow those big open spaces remind one of all that. They drive one's ineffectualness home on one. They remind one that environment, that mechanical civilisation, all the short cuts of applied science, after all count for little and inevitably come to the place called stop. And that braces one. It makes one the more eager after that which lies behind the material aspects of things, and to which these merely act as a veil."
Honoria had bowed herself together. Her elbows were on her knees, her chin in her two hands, her charming face alight with a pure enthusiasm. And Richard watched her curiously. His acquaintance with women was fairly comprehensive, but this woman represented a type new to his experience. He wanted to tolerate her merely, to regard her as an element in his scheme of self-discipline. And it began to occur to him that, from some points of view, she knew as much about that, as much about the idea inspiring it, as he did. He leaned himself back in the angle of the sofa, and clasped his hands behind his head.
"All the same," he said, "I am afraid those burnt acres on Spendle Flats are hardly extensive enough to afford an object for me to knock my head against, and so enforce salutary remembrance of the limitations of human science. Possibly that has already been sufficiently brought home to me in other ways."
He paused a minute.
Honoria straightened herself up. Again she saw—whether she would or no—those defective shortened limbs and oddly shod feet. And again, somehow, that complaint of the moist spring wind seemed to cry against her bare arms and neck, begetting an overwhelming pitifulness in her.
"So, since it's not necessary we should reserve it as an object lesson in general ineffectualness, Miss St. Quentin, what shall we do with it?"