And they saw Chester's twin sister. She was harmless; she was even doing crochet work; and her face was the face of Chester uninformed by thought. Mrs. Chester said, "Nicky will have told you of our poor ailing girl...."
5
They came away next morning. They faced each other in the train, but they read the Times (half each) and did not meet each other's eyes. They could not. They felt as thieves who still have consciences must feel when congratulated on their crimes by other thieves, who have not. Between them stood and jeered a Being with a vacant face and a phrase which it repeated with cynical reiteration. "You have let humanity have its way with you. Humanity; the simple human things.... No laws will ever supersede them...." And the Being's face was as the face of Chester's twin sister, the poor ailing girl.
To this they had come, then; to the first of the three simple human things mentioned by the bishop. What now, since they had started down the long slope of this green and easy hill, should arrest their progress, until they arrived, brakeless and unheld, into the valley where the other two waited, cynical, for all their simplicity, and grim?
Kitty, staring helplessly into the problematical future, saw, as if someone had turned a page and shown it to her, a domestic picture—herself and Chester (a peer, perhaps, why not?) facing one another not in a train but in a simple human home, surrounded by Family Life; two feckless, fallen persons, who had made a holocaust of theories and principles, who had reverted to the hand-to-mouth shiftlessness and mental sloppiness of the primitive Briton. Kitty could hear Chester, in that future, vaguer, family, peer's voice that might then be his, saying, "We must just trust to luck and muddle through somehow."
Even to that they might come....
In the next Great War—and who should stay its advent if such as these failed?—their sons would fight, without talent, their daughters would perhaps nurse, without skill. And so on, and so on, and so on....
So turned the world around. Individual desire given way to, as usual, ruining principle and ideals by its soft pressure. What would ever get done in such a world? Nothing, ever.
Suddenly, as if both had seen the same picture, they met one another's eyes across the carriage, and laughed ruefully.
That, anyhow, they could always do, though sitting among the debris of ruined careers, ruined principles, ruined Ministries, ruined ideals. It was something; perhaps, in a sad and precarious world, it was much....