“You might have come from princely stock by the look of you. You haven’t the seeming of the drab.”
“Perhaps I did; but it was the inbred collapsed finish of the good stock. My father idled backward to the slums—my mother was gentle, but that was all. He was dead before I could remember. Oh, that dreadful back-street life! You can’t understand. We were only a little removed from the gossipy-doorstep folk who talk of a neighbour’s confinement as they lean on the rickety railings. We played with their children, my sister and I, bought from their horrid mean shops—went to the same wretched school. Oh! how I hated it all—the miserable rooms, the bargaining for food, the squabbles, and the never-ending economy and thrift. Grey—grey—grey! I used to lash a purple whiptop at the corner of the street, and pray sometimes a great chariot of fire would snatch me up into the skies.”
It was Wynne’s habit to ignore central ideas in another’s conversation, hence the question:
“Why a purple top?”
“I hardly know—but it was always purple. I kept a patch of purple on my horizon.”
He looked at her queerly.
“What do you mean by that?”
“The Royal Purple. Somehow it stands out as the colour which rises above all sordidness. Can’t explain it otherwise.”
He nodded. “I know what you mean. Strange you should feel like that, too.” The “too” was scarcely audible.
“When I was ever so little I had that feeling, and it has grown up with me. I used to believe that a purple goodness lined the great clouds above and the hilltops of my imagination. I could travel in my imagination, too. Just close my eyes and say to myself: Now the world is falling away, and I’m floating upwards, and I would pass above all the slates and see down all the chimneys until the houses became cities, and the cities grey marks on the green earth—and the rivers twisted silver wires which curled from the mountains to the sea.”