A Laodicean. Томас Харди

drew it along the hollow, saying, ‘That is the curve I mean.’

      Somerset’s hand was hot and trembling; Paula’s, on the contrary, was cool and soft as an infant’s.

      ‘Now the arch-mould,’ continued he. ‘There—the depth of that cavity is tremendous, and it is not geometrical, as in later work.’ He drew her unresisting fingers from the capital to the arch, and laid them in the little trench as before.

      She allowed them to rest quietly there till he relinquished them. ‘Thank you,’ she then said, withdrawing her hand, brushing the dust from her finger-tips, and putting on her glove.

      Her imperception of his feeling was the very sublimity of maiden innocence if it were real; if not, well, the coquetry was no great sin.

      ‘Mr. Somerset, will you allow me to have the Greek court I mentioned?’ she asked tentatively, after a long break in their discourse, as she scanned the green stones along the base of the arcade, with a conjectural countenance as to his reply.

      ‘Will your own feeling for the genius of the place allow you?’

      ‘I am not a mediaevalist: I am an eclectic.’

      ‘You don’t dislike your own house on that account.’

      ‘I did at first—I don’t so much now. … I should love it, and adore every stone, and think feudalism the only true romance of life, if—’

      ‘What?’

      ‘If I were a De Stancy, and the castle the long home of my forefathers.’

      Somerset was a little surprised at the avowal: the minister’s words on the effects of her new environment recurred to his mind. ‘Miss De Stancy doesn’t think so,’ he said. ‘She cares nothing about those things.’

      Paula now turned to him: hitherto her remarks had been sparingly spoken, her eyes being directed elsewhere: ‘Yes, that is very strange, is it not?’ she said. ‘But it is owing to the joyous freshness of her nature which precludes her from dwelling on the past—indeed, the past is no more to her than it is to a sparrow or robin. She is scarcely an instance of the wearing out of old families, for a younger mental constitution than hers I never knew.’

      ‘Unless that very simplicity represents the second childhood of her line, rather than her own exclusive character.’

      Paula shook her head. ‘In spite of the Greek court, she is more Greek than I.’

      ‘You represent science rather than art, perhaps.’

      ‘How?’ she asked, glancing up under her hat.

      ‘I mean,’ replied Somerset, ‘that you represent the march of mind—the steamship, and the railway, and the thoughts that shake mankind.’

      She weighed his words, and said: ‘Ah, yes: you allude to my father. My father was a great man; but I am more and more forgetting his greatness: that kind of greatness is what a woman can never truly enter into. I am less and less his daughter every day that goes by.’