"Your second self?"
"My real self—my only comrade. You know, don't you? When one grows up alone there grows up with one an inner comrade—the truer self.... Otherwise the solitude of life must become intolerable."
"Yes, I understand."
"All lonely children have such a comrade, I suppose. Absolute self-isolation seems unendurable—actually impossible for a human being."
She resumed her knitting, meditatively, as a youthful princess might pick up her embroidery.
"As for the gutter," she said, "—out of the common earth we came, and we return to it.... Christ wandered, too, in very humble places."
CHAPTER XX
About noon a British soldier in uniform and mounted on a motor cycle came whizzing up to the Golden Peach.
Warner was in his room writing to his bankers in Paris; Philippa, in her room, was mending underwear; Halkett, who had walked to the school only to learn that Sister Eila had gone to the quarries, came out of the garden, where he had been sitting in silence with Ariadne.
The cyclist, a fresh-faced young fellow, saluted his uniform; Halkett took the dispatches, read them, turned on his heel and went upstairs to make his adieux. First he knocked on Philippa's door, and when the girl appeared he took his leave of her with a new and oddly stiff deference which seemed akin to shyness.