The Rector flushed with pleasure. How convincing his arguments had been!
"My dear Everest, it's most good of you. I assure you it will take a load off my mind. I really feel ashamed to go and beg any more from my parishioners, though I must say, hard pressed for money as they are, and hard as they have to work for it, they seldom refuse me."
Regina, sitting opposite them both, and watching the pale, severe gravity that had come over the handsome countenance, knew that Everest was giving that hundred, not because he cared whether the very unmodel cottagers in their model cottages had hearths or not, nor whether the tribes of sickly infants that they had no right to bring into the world at all, since they could not keep them, were warmed by his fires or not, but simply because it was Regina's father who asked him, and because Regina herself sat opposite him, and another link was looped up in that golden chain that was slowly forging in life's furnace to bind her to him.
"All the same you know I don't think you are right, John," Everest answered easily, in his light, polished tones. "You think you are alleviating poverty, but in reality you are creating it. The dread of dying in the workhouse when they are old is the only stimulus to a great many to work at all while they are young; take that away, and put old vagabonds in free model cottages, what inducement do you give to the young vagabond to work? And what reward have you for the honest, sober hard worker if you take his savings to help keep his idle and drunken brother? It seems to me you actually put a premium on idleness and vice, and rob honesty and virtue to do it. Then as regards your idea of morality, I think that the poor, hard-working, healthy girl, who, without marriage, brings one healthy child into the world, and works all her life to keep it, as many of them do, is a less deadly enemy to society than those wretched, improvident couples who rush into marriage and keep producing more and more unfit humanity, for which there is no use, and which other people at their own self-sacrifice have to support."
The Rector's large face gradually grew purple as he listened; he was a very heavy eater and drinker, and all his superabundant blood went up to his head in boiling wrath if anyone attacked his particular and exceedingly narrow outlook upon sexual subjects. Here, he had to choke down his feelings as best he could, for he would not, on any account, quarrel with Everest. Moreover the cheque was promised but not yet written. He cleared his throat many times, and nervously broke up the toast crusts lying at his left hand, before replying.
"I know your views are peculiar," he said at last; "they were at Oxford; I am afraid you hardly give due importance to the Sacraments of the Church. Er ... have we all finished? Then let us say grace."
Everest's eyes met Regina's and a little flash passed between them, an instant's glance that was very dear to them both. She loved him for every word he had uttered, and Everest knew that his views were hers, by the glad eager look on her face as she listened to him.
He knew each time he sat down to the table that his host was opposed to him in every opinion, and that the others had no opinions at all. It was only Regina, with her quick, active mentality, her rapid perceptions, that was with him, on every subject, and somehow the knowledge seemed very sweet to him, and to draw them very closely together.
Luncheon over, the elder girls went up to change their toilettes, and Everest and Regina stepped through the long windows out upon the lawn. It was a wonderful day. After a cold and stormy spring, summer had come in with that perfect glory, that golden radiance, that rescue England's reputation from entire ruin.
The sky, of the palest, most delicate blue, showed tiny dapplings of pearly white against its sapphire clearness; all the air seemed dancing with a golden sheen, and in it seemed to hang, like a canopy, the scent of flowers, of the pink and white snow of the May not yet over, of the laburnum already in blossom.