“But you may do a lot of harm by adding them up to make six. Why not try to learn?”
“I don’t believe God adds up,” said Evangeline, tracing patterns in the sand with her finger. “But then I expect He knows the answer without thinking, so that doesn’t come to anything.”
“I don’t know your husband, Mrs. Hatton,” said Mr. Vachell, “but I hope he is not passionately fond of arithmetic.”
“He has a passion for everything uncomfortable,” said Evangeline.
“Poor fellow!” observed Mr. Vachell.
“Mr. Vachell, really I don’t think you need look like that,” said Teresa. “Your study, which I saw once, is the most hauntingly uncomfortable place I was ever led into. I couldn’t go to sleep the night after I had seen it.”
“Why, what is the matter with it?” he asked, surprised.
“Everything is so dug up,” she explained. “Have you ever seen it, Chips?” she turned to her sister. “I do think when people have finished with their lives they might be allowed to get rid of them decently. To have their bones and their tears and the things they have been happy with all brought back and looked at——. Suppose someone dug up Millport thousands of years after us, and put a whole street full of people together again! Personal possessions are bad enough when the people who own them are alive; they are so full of—I don’t know what—associations. But when the owners are dead their things become perfectly horrid. I don’t think anyone ought to own anything at all. I would like them to live out of doors in tents that don’t cost anything, and to eat with their fingers——”
“I am very sorry my things worried you so much,” said Mr. Vachell. “I have always looked at them quite prosaically as history; interesting in their way. In fact, I think I could show you that they are interesting if you came and looked at them again. Some of them are very beautiful, and if people make beautiful things to please themselves they are worth keeping. The world would be very squalid by now if it had gone on as you suggest. Think of the grass all trampled down with being sat upon and nobody’s hair ever having been combed, and how dreadfully they would all quarrel and gossip with nothing to do.”
“I expect I was thinking of a world with fewer people in it,” said Teresa. “It makes me giddy when I think of arranging a government that will be fair to millions and millions of people, each one of them just a little different from any one of the others.”