"Joe Hicks," she said, pronouncing the name as though it were that of some dear friend suddenly dragged out of the by-gone years. "Surely not the same Joe Hicks who used to let us ride with him sometimes from Malcolmville out to the farm?"
"The same Joe Hicks," said I, and with a strange disregard for forms and effects I gave way to a natural desire of hunger and dived at the curate's delight, forgetting entirely the crumb-begetting habits of cake. "Try one of those," I went on, indicating the topmost plate, and to my delight she helped herself, almost with avidity. "You remember, Penelope, how we used to loiter near the kitchen when we smelled cake in the oven?"
Then Penelope laughed as though in the sheer joy of casting years away and living over her childhood.
"Indeed I do," she returned. "But we were speaking of Joe Hicks. You surprised me. He was an old man when we knew him."
"He was seventy then. He is still seventy," I returned.
"Stage-driving, you know, is conducive——"
"I used to think I'd like to be a stage-driver when I grew up," she interrupted. "You would see so much of the world with so little trouble, just holding the reins as the horses ambled along. How our ideas change, David!"
It was on the old and unchanged ideas that I wanted to dwell. The new would bring me back all too quickly to ancestral portraits, to imposing fireplaces and costly bear-skin rugs. I assented readily to her self-evident proposition and brushed it aside for the most interesting matter of Joseph Hicks.
"You used to love to drive," I said. "I can see you now wheedling Joe into letting you have the reins. Don't you remember his telling you that no self-respecting woman was ever seen driving more than one horse?"
"How shocked he would be could he see how I handle four," she said.
Should we never get out of the shadow of costly things, out of the clutch of changed ideas? For a moment I had a picture of Penelope on the box of a coach, ribbons and whip in hand, with four smart cobs stepping to the music of jingling harness, with bandy-legged grooms on the boot, and beside her some perfectly tailored creature in a glistening top-hat. It was a gallant picture, and one in which there was no part for me. Metaphorically I hurled at it a missile of the common clay of which, after all, we were both made. Surely fishing was a subject on which her ideas could not change.