“I love it,” she said. And this was true.
“Tell me,” he said. “Was it Anthony who took your religious faith from you?”
“Oh, Mr. Dyke!” She gave a little cry of surprise and distress. “Of course not. Tony and I haven’t discussed sacred matters for ever so long.”
“But you don’t believe—I mean, as we church people—do you, dear?”
Emmie made a fluttering movement of her gloved hands, then folded them on her lap, and with puckered brows looked across the sea to the faint silver line of the horizon. “It would be wicked of me to pretend. I’ll tell you what I believe.” But what did she believe? It was not easy to say, although she spoke with absolute sincerity. She told him that all her faith in the orthodox Christian doctrine had gone from her so gradually—and she must add so easily—that she scarce knew how it went or when it was gone finally. She thought—now that she considered it—that association with a mind as bold as his son’s had perhaps had its part in rendering her old submissive faith impossible. But the loss of orthodoxy had not made her a materialist—oh, far from that. She firmly believed in some supreme and beneficent force that ruled the spiritual universe. That, she thought, was his son’s belief also. And she wound up with words to the effect that it would be most terrible to her if she might not go on hoping there would be some kind of after life in which she and Anthony could clasp impalpable hands and exchange the phantom equivalent of kisses.
“I see—I understand,” said Mr. Dyke gently; and he got up from the bench. “Perhaps very few people could say more nowadays. I don’t know. I never judge. It is all a mystery—but I am too old to change, myself. Shall we toddle back to our roast beef? If we’re late Hannah will scold us again. Thank you, dear”; and he took her arm.
He said he was old, and he looked old; she noticed then, more clearly than before, the uncertain footsteps, the violent yet feeble effort, the moving fragility of age.
Why should she be surprised? Time was standing still for nobody. The blondness of comfortable Mrs. Bell of Queen’s Gate had gone. She had lost that appearance of an expensive court card, she had been shuffled from the pack or had become a queen dowager; she was out of breath when she got to the top of Emmie’s steep staircase, and she went regularly to Homburg or Harrogate for the waters. When she gave parties her fine big rooms were thronged with another generation, who asked leave to push the valuable furniture on one side in order to dance, and then didn’t dance, but romped in a thing they called “the Boston.”
Wherever Emmie turned her large mild eyes, she could see the changes wrought by unstationary time. It was becoming dangerous to cross the Brompton Road because of the buzzing motor cars, which travelled faster than the motor ’buses. The tube railway had been opened. Men were flying in the air and going in boats below the surface of the water; members of the female aristocracy were dining in low necks at the Carlton Hotel; Mr. Lloyd George was a responsible cabinet minister. What would Mr. Verinder have thought and said? In Exhibition Road one met well-to-do young men smoking pipes, wearing preposterous knickerbockers, and carrying golf clubs; young ladies rode astride past the windows of Prince’s Gate; only the will of Queen Alexandra kept mechanically propelled traffic out of Hyde Park itself.