“Eth,” said Ivor, as he placed the contested gun carefully back in the position from which his father had moved it.
“Nonsense,” said Evangeline temptingly. “Come here and kiss me and make it up.”
“Take—away—your—’uthband,” Ivor said slowly, as if he were repeating a lesson to himself. His mother and his aunt shouted with delight and could hardly believe that the child had meant it. Ivor’s face was quite unmoved. “Come on,” said Evangeline, seizing Evan by the arm and dragging him out of the room. “You can’t stay after that.” But he neither smiled nor answered. He followed them downstairs and did not speak for some time.
When he had gone out again after tea Evangeline sat for a time looking idly into the fire. “Dicky,” she began after a little while, “whatever you do don’t marry a man with whom you daren’t be truthful. Before I talk to Evan I have to treat what I want to say as if it were to a foreigner and had to be translated into his language. First I have to cut out the bits that won’t do because of the prejudices he was brought up in. Then I have to change whole chunks that he would associate with other women whom he dislikes and who have said the same things; we do, as a sex, rather talk about the same things as each other, don’t we? But when he has heard some gas-bag of a creature say, ‘Oh, Captain Hatton, I do love children!’ (which she probably does) he thinks the whole subject exhausted, and shamefully exhausted too! So if any woman uses the word ‘love’ at any time afterwards he looks the subject up in his mind and finds a note, ‘memo. gas. Mrs. T.’ and there’s an end of it; so in future, when I want to say anything about love I have to use another word. It is very hampering.”
“But you can’t go on using new words about everything,” said Teresa.
“No, but you see in the kind of things he talks to men about the words can’t very well be misused. If you are describing what has gone wrong with an engine you can only use words like ‘plug’ and ‘spring’ and ‘valve,’ that have only one meaning. Even a lawyer couldn’t say, ‘I suggest that when you tell the Court that the valve was defective you inferred that John Brown’s baby had a wart on its nose.’ But that is what Evan does if I try to tell him what Ivor is thinking—things that I know quite well because I remember being a child, and he doesn’t.”
“Yes, I see,” said Teresa.
“Well, let us get on to David,” said her sister. “Does what I have said apply to him or not?”
“No, not at all,” (very emphatically).
“Then why doesn’t he do what you want?”