“Some more cocoa, dearie?”
“Rather. Yes, three lumps, please. Just think what we can get out of life, you and I, with our tiny income. We get what we put into it—and that’s something literally priceless, and we mustn’t let it go. Whatever happens we must stick to it.”
“Nothing can take it away from us,” said Aggie, rapt in her dream.
“No; no outside thing can. But, Aggie—we can take it from each other, if we let ourselves get slack. Whatever we do,” he said, solemnly, “we mustn’t get slack. We must keep it up.”
“Yes,” said Aggie, “we must keep it up.”
They had pledged themselves to that.
IV
No fowler spreads his snares in sight of those innocent birds that perch on the tree of life in paradise. As Arthur’s soul (it was a vain soul) preened its wings before her, Aggie never inquired whether the brilliance of its plumage was its own, or merely common to all feathered things in the pairing season. Young Arthur’s soul was like a lark, singing in heaven its delirious nuptial hymn. Aggie sat snug in her nest and marvelled at her mate, at the mounting of his wings, the splendid and untiring ardors of his song. Nor was she alarmed at his remarkable disappearance into the empyrean. Lost to sight he might be, but she could count on his swift, inevitable descent into the nest.
The nest itself was the most wonderful nest a bird ever sat in. The two were so enthusiastic over everything that they delighted even in that dreadful, creaking, yellow villa. Its very vices entertained them. When it creaked they sat still and looked at each other, waiting for it to do it again. No other house ever possessed such ungovernable and mysterious spontaneities of sound. It was sometimes, they said, as if the villa were alive. And when all the wood-work shrank, and the winter winds streamed through their sitting-room, Aggie said nothing but put sand-bags in the window and covered them with art serge.
Her mother declared that she had never stayed in a more inconvenient house; but Aggie wouldn’t hear a word against it. It was the house that Arthur had chosen. She was sorry, she said, if her mother didn’t like it. Mrs. Purcell was sorry, too, because she could not honestly say that, in the circumstances, she enjoyed a visit to Aggie and her husband. They made her quite uncomfortable, the pair of them. Their ceaseless activities and enthusiasms bewildered her. She didn’t care a rap about the lectures, and thought they were mad to go traipsing all the way to Hampstead to harangue about things they could have discussed just as well—now, couldn’t they?—at home. Aggie, she said, would become completely undomesticated. Mrs. Purcell was never pressed to stay longer than a week. They had no further need of her, those two sublime young egoists, fused by their fervors into one egoist, sublimer still. Mrs. Purcell was a sad hinderance to the intellectual life, and they were glad when she was gone.