“So do I,” said Eddy. “I love the people who can. They’re so—— well, alive, somehow. Even more than most people, I mean; if possible,” he added, conscious of Molly’s intense aliveness, and Daphne’s, and his own, and Diddums’. But the geniuses, he knew, had a sort of white-hot flame of living beyond even that....
“We’d better wait here for the others,” said Molly, stopping at the field gate, “and I’ll hand over Diddums to Daffy. He’ll feel it’s all right if I put him in her arms and tell him to stay there.”
They waited, sitting on the stile. The silver light flooded the brown fields, turning them grey and pale. It silvered Diddums’ absurd brown body as he snuggled in Molly’s arms, and Molly’s curly, escaping waves of hair and small sweet face, a little paled by its radiance. To Eddy the grey fields and woods and Molly and Diddums beneath the moon made a delightful home-like picture, of which he himself was very much part. Eddy certainly had a convenient knack of fitting into any picture without a jar, whether it was a Sunday School class at St. Gregory’s, a Sunday Games Club in Chelsea, a canons’ tea at the Deanery, the stables and kennels at the Hall, or a walk with a puppy over country fields. He belonged to all of them, and they to him, so that no one ever said “What is he doing in that galère?” as is said from time to time of most of us.
Eddy, as they waited for Claude and Daphne at the gate, was wondering a little whether his new friends would fit easily into this picture. He hoped so, very much.
The others came up, bickering as usual. Molly put Diddums into Daphne’s arms and told him to stay there, and they parted.
CHAPTER VII.
VISITORS AT THE DEANERY.
EDDY, while they played coon-can that evening (a horrid game prevalent at this time) approached his parents on the subject of the visitors he wanted. He mentioned to them the facts already retailed to Daphne and Molly concerning their accomplishments and virtues (omitting those concerning their domestic arrangements). And these eulogies are a mistake when one is asking friends to stay. One should not utter them. To do so starts a prejudice hard to eradicate in the minds of parents and brothers and sisters, and the visit may prove a failure. Eddy was intelligent and should have known this, but he was in an unthinking mood this Christmas, and did it.
His mother kindly said, “Very well, dear. Which day do you want them to come?”
“I’d rather like them to be here for New Year’s day, if you don’t mind. They might come on the thirty-first.”
Eddy put down three twos in the first round, for the excellent reason that he had collected them. Daphne, disgusted, said, “Look at Teddy saving six points off his damage! I suppose that’s the way they play in your slum.”