‘How pleasant it is,’ said Leo, throwing himself into a chair, ‘to be understood before one says anything! That is precisely what I have been doing, and what I have come to do.’
‘There was no great insight required in either case,’ said Lady William. ‘And how do you like us now you have seen us, Leo? The Rectory is homely, but they’re all as good as gold. Yes, they are, though they are my people. You know one doesn’t often admire one’s sister-in-law, and I don’t pretend to admire her; but she’s a good woman, and the girls are excellent.’
Leo allowed to breathe into his voice a slight, though very slight, suspicion of fatigue.
‘You will not be surprised, dear lady,’ he said, ‘if I say that the member of the family who interested me most was your brother; and who is the son who could not be found, who is reading with his father?’
‘Ah, Jim, poor boy!’
‘Yes? I think I understand; there are then troubles even in this idyllic life?’
‘It is so little a stranger knows. I think there is no idyllic life. We are very prosaic and poor, and our troubles are so very real—vulgar, you might call them. We look up, on the other hand, to what we call your brilliant and gay life, and think, surely there are no troubles there. Thus it is true, you see, the one half of the world never understands the other.’
‘But you,’ said Leo, ‘know both.’
‘Do I? I had a little share of the other, very short, and not, perhaps, very satisfactory. I never found it very brilliant or gay. The village life I know by heart, and its troubles, which are bad enough; small little vices and weakness, dreadfully poor and commonplace: you can’t understand how pitiful they are.’
‘Can’t I? Well, so far as it is of any use, you must teach me. For you know from henceforth I am English, and will do my duty. My duty, perhaps, does not demand an endless seclusion here.’