She gave him a queer glancing smile.
“It’s a dangerous philosophy. Sometimes it leads to peculiar complications!”
“How do you mean?” asked Bertram. “To me it simplifies the whole riddle. The love of a man for his mate, through thick and thin, fine weather and foul, ‘in sickness and in health.’—D’you remember the old words in St. Mary Abbot’s?”
“Yes. I remember. I was a baby then. We were both babes, as ignorant of life as those tits.”
She pointed to two little birds fluttering about the branch of a tree where they sat.
“But with the same share in the eternal scheme of things,” said Bertram. “You and I went to St. Mary Abbot’s under the same divine impulse as those two tits set up housekeeping in the tree-top.”
“Yes,” said Joyce, “I suppose it’s over-civilisation that has spoilt the game.”
“Is the game spoilt?” asked Bertram.
“It’s hard to play according to the rules, sometimes. And if we keep to the rules the fun goes out of the game. It’s just duty. Mostly disagreeable, and sometimes intolerable.”
Bertram laughed so that the two tits were frightened and flew away from their branch. He took Joyce’s hand and put it to his lips.