“You always say that. It’s foolish. You made yourself, Dulcie. You are making yourself all the while. Why, good heavens!—if you hadn’t had it in you, somehow, to ignore your surroundings—take the school opportunities offered you—close your eyes and ears to the sights and sounds and habits of what was supposed to be your home——”
He checked himself, thinking of Soane, and his brogue, and his ignorance and his habits.
“How the devil you escaped it all I can’t understand,” he muttered to himself. “Even when I first knew you, there was nothing resembling your—your father about you—even if you were almost in rags!”
“I had been with the Sisters until I went to high school,” she murmured. “It makes a difference in a child’s mind what is said and thought by those around her.”
“Of course. But, Dulcie, it is usually the unfortunate rule that the lower subtly contaminates the higher, even in casual association—that the weaker gradually undermines the stronger until it sinks to lesser levels. It has not been so with you. Your clear mind remained untarnished, your aspiration uncontaminated. Somewhere within you had been born the quality of recognition; and when your eyes opened on better things you recognised them and did not forget after they disappeared——”
Again he ceased speaking, aware, suddenly, that for 236 the first time he was making the effort to analyse this girl for his own information. Heretofore, he had accepted her, sometimes curious, sometimes amused, puzzled, doubtful, even uneasy as her mind revealed itself by degrees and her character glimmered through in little fitful gleams from that still hidden thing, herself.
He began to speak again, before he knew he was speaking—indeed, as though within him somewhere another man were using his lips and voice as vehicles:
“You know, Dulcie, it’s not going to end—our companionship. Your real life is all ahead of you; it’s already beginning—the life which is properly yours to shape and direct and make the most of.
“I don’t know what kind of life yours is going to be; I know, merely, that your career doesn’t lie down stairs in the superintendent’s lodgings. And this life of ours here in the studio is only temporary, only a phase of your development toward clearer aims, higher aspiration, nobler effort.
“Tranquillity, self-respect, intelligent responsibility, the happiness of personal independence are the prizes: the path on which you have started leads to the only pleasure man has ever really known—labour.”