“You? Why——” He beamed suddenly on her.
“I’m free on Friday. I could go up to town with you.”
“You’re an angel!” he declared. “A winged angel from heaven.” The boy in him broke out sunnily. “That’ll make all the difference. What a dear you are. Won’t we have a time! I’ll love to see you choosing the beast’s pyjamas.”
“They shall be stout and sober flannel,” said Marcelle.
“No. Silk. Green, red, yellow and violet. The sort of thing the chameleon committed suicide on.”
“Who’s going to run the show—you or I?”
“Oh you. You all the time.”
He laughed and hobbled up the steps in high good humour.
Marcelle went off to her duties smiling pensively. What a happy woman would be the right woman for Godfrey. Wax in her hands—but wax of the purest. She was astonished at the transformation from cloud to sunshine which she, elderly spinster nearly double his age, had effected, and her nerves tingled with a sense of feminine power. Her thoughts switched off from son to father. They were so much alike—from the feminine point of view, basically children. Were not her fears groundless? Could she not play upon the man as she played upon the boy? Recent experience answered yes.
But then she faced the root difference. To the boy she surrendered nothing. To the man she would have to pay for any measure of domination the price of an indurated habit of existence, the change of which was fraught with intolerable fear. No. She could take, take all that she wanted. But she could not give. There was nothing in her to give. Better this beautiful autumn friendship than a false recrudescence of spring, in which lay disaster and misery and disillusion.