"But—but—those lovely little boys of yours!——"
She gazed wide-eyed at the disconcerted Dorothy....
It was the humiliating truth: Dorothy had never heard of the existence of a single one of these writers and leaders of thought. She had borne Noel in black ignorance of what they had had to say about the Torch of the Race, and Jackie and the third Bit for all the world as if they had never set pen to paper. Monod had not held her hand, nor Faure been asked for his imprimatur; Key had hymned Love superfluously, and the Synthesists, equally superfluously, its supersession. For a moment she anxiously hoped that it was all right, and then, as Katie went on, the marvel of it all overwhelmed her again.
The dictum that desirable children could be born only out of wedlock! That stupendous suggestion of Walter's to millionaires who did not know what to do with their money, that, for the improvement of the Race, they should endow with a thousand pounds every poor little come-by-chance that weighed eleven pounds at birth! That other proposal, that twenty years could straightway be added to woman's life and beauty by a mere influencing of her thoughts about the Chromosome—whatever it was!... Poor uncultured Dorothy did not know whether she was on her head or her heels. She had never dreamed, until Katie told her, that before marrying Stan she ought to have gone to the insect-world, or to the world of molluscs and crustacæ, to learn how they maintained the integrity of their own highest type—whether by pulling their wings off after the flight, or devouring their husbands, or—or—or what! She had heard of the moral lessons that can be learned of the ant, but it had not struck her that she and Stan might, by means of a little more study and care, have lifted up the economy of their little flat to the level of the marvellously-organized domesticity you see when you kick over a stone.
But Katie's hesitations and great gaps of confessed ignorance gave her a little more courage. Katie was at pains to explain that all that she herself knew about it all was that these things were what they said, and Dorothy must go to Walter and the books for the rest.
"They're all very expensive books, and I may not really have understood them," she said wistfully. "They must be awfully deep and so on if they're so dear—twelve and fifteen and twenty shillings! But I did try so hard, and sometimes it seemed quite reasonable and plain, especially when the print was nice and big.... Close print always seems so frightfully learned.... And I know I've explained it badly; I haven't Walter's gift of putting things. Amory has, of course. When she and Walter have a really good set-to it makes one feel positively abject about one's ignorance. I doubt if Cosimo can always quite follow them, and I'm quite sure Mr. Strong can't—I know he's only hedging when he says, 'Ah, yes, have you read Fabre on the Ant or Maeterlinck on the Bee?'—and I believe he just glances at the review books that come to the 'Novum' instead of really studying them, as Walter and Amory do. And it's very funny about Mr. Strong," she rattled artlessly on. "Sometimes I've thought that it isn't just that Amory doesn't know what they all go to The Witan for, but that everybody else does know. They all seem to want it to themselves. Of course if Mr. Wilkinson wants Cosimo to stop the 'Novum,' and to start something else for him, it's only natural that he and Mr. Strong should be a little jealous of one another; but Dickie and Mr. Brimby are jealous of the Wyrons, and I suppose I was jealous of Dickie too—and everybody seems jealous of everybody, and Amory of Cosimo, and Amory's always interfering between Britomart Belchamber and the twins' lessons, and that can't be a very good thing for discipline, but Britomart's like me in being rather stupid, and I wish I'd her screw—she gets nearly twice as much as I do. The only people who don't seem jealous of anybody are those Indians. They're always affable. I suppose it's rather nice for them, so far from their own country, having a house to go to...."
But here Dorothy's humility and self-distrust ended. The moment it came to India, she shared her aunt's deplorable narrow-mindedness and propensity to make a virtue of her intolerance. It seemed to her that it was one thing for the Tims and Tonys, in India, to have to employ a native interpreter (and to be pretty severely rooked by him) when they had their Urdu Higher Proficiency to pass, but quite another for these same natives to come over here, and to learn our law and language, and our excellent national professions, and our somewhat mitigated ways of living up to them. No, she was not one whit better than her hide-bound old aunt, and she did not intend to have too practical a brotherly love taught at that meditated foundation at the Brear....
She became silent as she thought of that foundation again, and presently Katie rose.
"I suppose I couldn't see him in his cot?" she said wistfully.