The car stopped, as it seemed, on the green prairie, thirty miles from Winnipeg. Elizabeth was given up to the owner of the great farm--one of the rich men of Canada for whom experiment in the public interest becomes a passion; and Anderson walked on her other hand.
Delaine endured a wearisome half-hour. He got no speech with Elizabeth, and prize cattle were his abomination. When the half-hour was done, he slipped away, unnoticed, from the party. He had marked a small lake or "slough" at the rear of the house, with wide reed-beds and a clump of cottonwood. He betook himself to the cottonwood, took out his pocket Homer and a notebook, and fell to his task. He was in the thirteenth book:
[Greek: ôs d hot anêr dorpoio lilaietai, ô te pauêmar neion an helkêton boe oinope pêkton arotron]
"As when a man longeth for supper, for whom, the livelong day, two wine-coloured oxen have dragged the fitted plough through the fallow, and joyful to such an one is the going down of the sun that sends him to his meal, for his knees tremble as he goes--so welcome to Odysseus was the setting of the sun": ...
He lost himself in familiar joy--the joy of the Greek itself, of the images of the Greek life. He walked with the Greek ploughman, he smelt the Greek earth, his thoughts caressed the dark oxen under the yoke. These for him had savour and delight; the wide Canadian fields had none.
Philip Gaddesden meanwhile could not be induced to leave the car. While the others were going through the splendid stables and cowsheds, kept like a queen's parlour, he and the pretty girl were playing at bob-cherry in the saloon, to the scandal of Yerkes, who, with the honour of the car and the C.P.R. and Canada itself on his shoulders, could not bear that any of his charges should shuffle out of the main item in the official programme.
But Elizabeth, as before, saw everything transfigured; the splendid Shire horses; the famous bull, progenitor of a coming race; the sheds full of glistening cows and mottled calves. These smooth, sleek creatures, housed there for the profit of Canada and her farm life, seemed to Elizabeth no less poetic than the cattle of Helios to Delaine. She loved the horses, and the patient, sweet-breathed kine; she found even a sympathetic mind for the pigs.
Presently when her host, the owner, left her to explain some of his experiments to the rest of the party, she fell to Anderson alone. And as she strolled at his side, Anderson found the June afternoon pass with extraordinary rapidity. Yet he was not really as forthcoming or as frank as he had been the day before. The more he liked his companion, the more he was conscious of differences between them which his pride exaggerated. He himself had never crossed the Atlantic; but he understood that she and her people were "swells"--well-born in the English sense, and rich. Secretly he credited them with those defects of English society of which the New World talks--its vulgar standards and prejudices. There was not a sign of them certainly in Lady Merton's conversation. But it is easy to be gracious in a new country; and the brother was sometimes inclined to give himself airs. Anderson drew in his tentacles a little; ready indeed to be wroth with himself that he had talked so much of his own affairs to this little lady the day before. What possible interest could she have taken in them!
All the same, he could not tear himself from her side. Whenever Delaine left his seat by the lake, and strolled round the corner of the wood to reconnoitre, the result was always the same. If Anderson and Lady Merton were in sight at all, near or far, they were together. He returned, disconsolate, to Homer and the reeds.