Then, perceiving her daughter’s expression of perplexity, Mrs. Hilbery burst out laughing.
“My dear, I’m not talking about your William, though that’s another reason for liking him. I’m talking, I’m thinking, I’m dreaming of my William—William Shakespeare, of course. Isn’t it odd,” she mused, standing at the window and tapping gently upon the pane, “that for all one can see, that dear old thing in the blue bonnet, crossing the road with her basket on her arm, has never heard that there was such a person? Yet it all goes on: lawyers hurrying to their work, cabmen squabbling for their fares, little boys rolling their hoops, little girls throwing bread to the gulls, as if there weren’t a Shakespeare in the world. I should like to stand at that crossing all day long and say: ‘People, read Shakespeare!’”
Katharine sat down at her table and opened a long dusty envelope. As Shelley was mentioned in the course of the letter as if he were alive, it had, of course, considerable value. Her immediate task was to decide whether the whole letter should be printed, or only the paragraph which mentioned Shelley’s name, and she reached out for a pen and held it in readiness to do justice upon the sheet. Her pen, however, remained in the air. Almost surreptitiously she slipped a clean sheet in front of her, and her hand, descending, began drawing square boxes halved and quartered by straight lines, and then circles which underwent the same process of dissection.
“Katharine! I’ve hit upon a brilliant idea!” Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed—“to lay out, say, a hundred pounds or so on copies of Shakespeare, and give them to working men. Some of your clever friends who get up meetings might help us, Katharine. And that might lead to a playhouse, where we could all take parts. You’d be Rosalind—but you’ve a dash of the old nurse in you. Your father’s Hamlet, come to years of discretion; and I’m—well, I’m a bit of them all; I’m quite a large bit of the fool, but the fools in Shakespeare say all the clever things. Now who shall William be? A hero? Hotspur? Henry the Fifth? No, William’s got a touch of Hamlet in him, too. I can fancy that William talks to himself when he’s alone. Ah, Katharine, you must say very beautiful things when you’re together!” she added wistfully, with a glance at her daughter, who had told her nothing about the dinner the night before.
“Oh, we talk a lot of nonsense,” said Katharine, hiding her slip of paper as her mother stood by her, and spreading the old letter about Shelley in front of her.
“It won’t seem to you nonsense in ten years’ time,” said Mrs. Hilbery. “Believe me, Katharine, you’ll look back on these days afterwards; you’ll remember all the silly things you’ve said; and you’ll find that your life has been built on them. The best of life is built on what we say when we’re in love. It isn’t nonsense, Katharine,” she urged, “it’s the truth, it’s the only truth.”
Katharine was on the point of interrupting her mother, and then she was on the point of confiding in her. They came strangely close together sometimes. But, while she hesitated and sought for words not too direct, her mother had recourse to Shakespeare, and turned page after page, set upon finding some quotation which said all this about love far, far better than she could. Accordingly, Katharine did nothing but scrub one of her circles an intense black with her pencil, in the midst of which process the telephone-bell rang, and she left the room to answer it.
When she returned, Mrs. Hilbery had found not the passage she wanted, but another of exquisite beauty as she justly observed, looking up for a second to ask Katharine who that was?
“Mary Datchet,” Katharine replied briefly.
“Ah—I half wish I’d called you Mary, but it wouldn’t have gone with Hilbery, and it wouldn’t have gone with Rodney. Now this isn’t the passage I wanted. (I never can find what I want.) But it’s spring; it’s the daffodils; it’s the green fields; it’s the birds.”