“That isn’t in the least what I meant; it was rather the other way round.”
“And Mr. Watkins, why does he come to sit in Aunt Elsie’s garden?”
Across the lawn, towards the fount of his inspiration, knowing not she was there, came Mr. Watkins, murmuring as he walked: smiling as apt phrases broke from his lips—“rippling rhythmetic phrases,” he would have called them. He spoke to his sisters, the bees; sang to his brothers, the birds; conscious all the while of the suitability of his garb and the length of his hair. If Diana were but there to see! Diana was there and she saw, and she looked at Mr. Pease. Mr. Pease looked away. He carried Christianity to the length of never making fun of another less well placed than himself, and well placed he now was; next to Diana. And Diana, as she sat, had no other side. A matter for congratulation to any man, or child, who loves. To halve sides may mean an acute mental agony. On Diana’s other side rose a pillar of rambling roses, of which no man could be jealous. Mr. Pease had not got so far as to be jealous of the breezes that played in his lady’s hair, or of the roses that fluttered their petals over her. He left such things to Watkins.
“Well, Watkins?” he said.
“Is it well?” questioned Watkins, from despondent habit; then he caught sight of Diana. The spring went from his walk, the lilt from his voice. She had come back and Pease had known she was coming. Pease without a sense of honour was no longer his friend—the past must be as though it had never been. Never again would he confide in Pease: never again read him his poems: share his Sunday sausages.
“This is delightful!” he said, looking first at Pease, then at the pillar of roses that stood as it were on Diana’s left hand; finally he sank down at Diana’s feet. “Now tell me—everything,” he said; “what saw you in London?”
“Men and things—things and men,” said Diana.
“Just men?”
“Yes, just men, and unjust—poets and policemen.”
“Bad poets?”