"You would not call the Mother that?"
"No more than I would Queen Victoria or the Princess of Wales. And a snubbing from the Religious would be rather worse, on the whole, than a snubbing from the Royalty."
"The Princess never snubbed you?"
"Didn't she? Tremendously, once. Do you want to hear about it? She had sent away her brougham while the giddy old Dean and Chapter were showing her round St. Paul's. And—acting as Extra Equerry—I'd got instructions to call her a hack conveyance, and—being young and downy, I'd picked H.R.H. the glossiest growler on the rank. But you've been bred and born here. You don't even know what a growler is. And in five years' time there won't be one left in London."
"Perhaps I shall see London before the five years are over. And a growler is a four-wheeled cab. You see, I'm not so ignorant...."
"You sweetest!" he burst out passionately. "I wish I knew all that you could teach me!"
He might have frightened her if he had stretched out his arms to clasp her then. But he mastered himself so far. Lying at full length in the grass, leaning upon his elbow, he rested his head upon his hand, and drank her in with thirsty eyes. And that something emanating from him enveloped her, delicately and yet forcefully, constraining and urging and compelling her to meet his gaze. And the perfume of the great honeyed flower came to her in waves of sweetness, growing in strength, and the monotonous buzzing of the black honey-bees mingled with the drumming of the crickets, and the flowing of the river, and the beating of her heart, and the rushing of her blood. She leaned her fair head back against the great boulder, and said in a voice that shook a little:
"Tell me about the snubbing."
"It was High Art. Three words—and I knew I'd behaved like a bounder of the worst—I had to go back and get the other cab, with a broken front window and a cabby...." He chuckled. "I've met red noses enough but you could have seen that chap's glowing through the thickest fog that ever blanketed Ludgate Hill and wrapped the Strand in greasy mystery. Don't move, please!... There's a ray of sunshine touching your head that makes your hair look the colour of a chestnut when the prickly green hull first cracks to let it out. Or ... there's a rose grows on the pergola at home at Foltlebarre Royal, with a coppery sheen on the young leaves.... I wondered why I kept thinking of it as I looked at you. But I know now. And your skin is creamy white like the flower. Oh, if I could only gather the girl-rose and carry it home to the others!"
She was pink as the loveliest La France now.