“With all the pleasure in the world,” he said. “Only there isn’t much to tell.”
He made short work of what there was. His father, Graham Crosby, an explorer well known to geographical societies, had lost his life from fever in a South American jungle at the age of thirty-seven. His mother, faced with the prospect of almost unendurable poverty, tried her hand at novel writing. “The sentimental kind that you would have hated,” he said with a smile. However, they had an enormous success, and enabled her to send her only son to Sandhurst. She died at the close of the Boer War. They were not related to any Crosbys that he knew of, except some excessively dull ones who lived somewhere near Aberdeen.
“Very poor pickings for your mother, I’m afraid,” he said with a laugh.
Chip left her at the door with his rather old-fashioned bow, and she watched him until he reached the corner. There he turned, as she had guessed he would, and looked back, and as the maid opened the door, she waved her hand to him gayly. He walked stiffly, thanks to the accident, and leaned a little on his stick. Dear old Chip!…
So this was love! With her it took the form of a passionate tenderness. She wanted him to have success, and happiness. She wanted to help him to get them.
For Chip, the impossible thing that had happened was too dazzling, as yet, to be more than blinked at. It was as though an old dried stick had burst into blossom and leaf. As though water had been turned into wine. That Judy might be persuaded to care for him in return never entered his head. To love her was wonderful enough. Let a man of her own world, a man of wealth and standing, try to win her. Some day such a man would succeed, and he would have to bear that as he had borne lesser things. If his book received recognition, he might continue to enjoy this delightful friendship. If not, he must quietly drop out of Judy’s life. For he believed that a man had no right to accept a charming woman’s friendship unless he could lay appropriate and frequent sacrifices upon her altar. Which shows that the world had been rolling along under Chip’s very nose without his having observed the manner of its rolling.
One pleasure he permitted himself that day. He went into a little flower shop in Church Street and bought two dozen pink roses. It was one of his happiest moments; he had been so denied the joy of giving. On his card he wrote:
“I hope you will forgive me if I am doing a presumptuous thing in sending you these few flowers. But if they give you a little pleasure, I shall be well content.”
He felt bold, because he had nothing to lose. It was early February, too, with the softness of coming spring in the air, and hope dies hard in the spring, even at forty.