style="font-size:15px;"> “Yes, quite.”
“Then I will stay. I’m enjoying this.”
Dolly’s photograph was now examined. It was signed “For dear Mims,” which Mrs. Wilcox interpreted as “the name she and Charles had settled that she should call me.” Dolly looked silly, and had one of those triangular faces that so often prove attractive to a robust man. She was very pretty. From her Margaret passed to Charles, whose features prevailed opposite. She speculated on the forces that had drawn the two together till God parted them. She found time to hope that they would be happy.
“They have gone to Naples for their honeymoon.”
“Lucky people!”
“I can hardly imagine Charles in Italy.”
“Doesn’t he care for travelling?”
“He likes travel, but he does see through foreigners so. What he enjoys most is a motor tour in England, and I think that would have carried the day if the weather had not been so abominable. His father gave him a car for a wedding present, which for the present is being stored at Howards End.”
“I suppose you have a garage there?”
“Yes. My husband built a little one only last month, to the west of the house, not far from the wych-elm, in what used to be the paddock for the pony.”
The last words had an indescribable ring about them.
“Where’s the pony gone?” asked Margaret after a pause.
“The pony? Oh, dead, ever so long ago.”
“The wych-elm I remember. Helen spoke of it as a very splendid tree.”
“It is the finest wych-elm in Hertfordshire. Did your sister tell you about the teeth?”
“No.”
“Oh, it might interest you. There are pigs’ teeth stuck into the trunk, about four feet from the ground. The country people put them in long ago, and they think that if they chew a piece of the bark, it will cure the toothache. The teeth are almost grown over now, and no one comes to the tree.”
“I should. I love folklore and all festering superstitions.”
“Do you think that the tree really did cure toothache, if one believed in it?”
“Of course it did. It would cure anything—once.”
“Certainly I remember cases—you see I lived at Howards End long, long before Mr. Wilcox knew it. I was born there.”
The conversation again shifted. At the time it seemed little more than aimless chatter. She was interested when her hostess explained that Howards End was her own property. She was bored when too minute an account was given of the Fussell family, of the anxieties of Charles concerning Naples, of the movements of Mr. Wilcox and Evie, who were motoring in Yorkshire. Margaret could not bear being bored. She grew inattentive, played with the photograph frame, dropped it, smashed Dolly’s glass, apologised, was pardoned, cut her finger thereon, was pitied, and finally said she must be going—there was all the housekeeping to do, and she had to interview Tibby’s riding-master.
Then the curious note was struck again.
“Good-bye, Miss Schlegel, good-bye. Thank you for coming. You have cheered me up.”
“I’m so glad!”
“I—I wonder whether you ever think about yourself?”
“I think of nothing else,” said Margaret, blushing, but letting her hand remain in that of the invalid.
“I wonder. I wondered at Heidelberg.”
“I’M sure!”
“I almost think—”
“Yes?” asked Margaret, for there was a long pause—a pause that was somehow akin to the flicker of the fire, the quiver of the reading-lamp upon their hands, the white blur from the window; a pause of shifting and eternal shadows.
“I almost think you forget you’re a girl.”
Margaret was startled and a little annoyed. “I’m twenty-nine,” she remarked. “That’s not so wildly girlish.”
Mrs. Wilcox smiled.
“What makes you say that? Do you mean that I have been gauche and rude?”
A shake of the head. “I only meant that I am fifty-one, and that to me both of you—Read it all in some book or other; I cannot put things clearly.”
“Oh, I’ve got it—inexperience. I’m no better than Helen, you mean, and yet I presume to advise her.”
“Yes. You have got it. Inexperience is the word.”
“Inexperience,” repeated Margaret, in serious yet buoyant tones.
“Of course, I have everything to learn—absolutely everything—just as much as Helen. Life’s very difficult and full of surprises. At all events, I’ve got as far as that. To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged—well, one can’t do all these things at once, worse luck, because they’re so contradictory. It’s then that proportion comes in—to live by proportion. Don’t BEGIN with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed, and a deadlock—Gracious me, I’ve started preaching!”
“Indeed, you put the difficulties of life splendidly,” said Mrs. Wilcox, withdrawing her hand into the deeper shadows. “It is just what I should have liked to say about them myself.”
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