“Yes, most of us are stunted copies of our real selves,” he said. “Imitations of what we might be. And what might one not be?”
The talk had got for him, at any rate, suddenly serious, and he looked up at Lady Ellington with a sparkling eye.
“Explain,” she said.
“Well, it seems to me one cripples oneself in so many ways. One allows oneself to be nervous, and to be angry, and to be bound by conventions that are useless and cramping.”
“Tall hats, frock-coats?” asked she.
“No, certainly not, because they, at any rate, are perfectly harmless. But, to take an example of what I mean, it seems to me a ridiculous convention that we should all consider ourselves obliged to know what is going on in the world. It does not really do one any good to know that there is war between China and Japan. What does do us good is not to be ill-tempered, and never to be sad. Sadness and pessimism are the worst forms of mental disease I know. And the state will not put sad and pessimistic people in asylums, or isolate them at any rate so that their disease should not spread. Such diseases are so frightfully catching, and they are more fatal than fevers. People die of them, soul and body!”
Lady Ellington felt that Mrs. Home was collecting her eye, and rose.
“What a fascinating theory,” she said. “Just what I have always thought. Ah, I have caught my dress under my chair. You should have castors, Mr. Home, on your dining-room chairs.”
Evelyn moved up next to Tom Merivale after the others had left them.
“Dear old Hermit!” he said. “Now, you’ve got to give an account of yourself. Neither Phil nor I have seen you for a year. What have you been doing?”
Tom let the port pass him.
“I suppose you would call it nothing,” said he.
“Ah, but in real life people don’t go and live in the New Forest and do nothing. What have you written in the last year?”
“Not one line. Seriously, I have been doing nothing except a little gardening and carpentering; just manual labour to keep one sane.”’
“Well, it looks as if it suited you. You look well enough, and what is so odd, you look so much younger.”
Tom laughed again.
“Ah, that strikes you, does it?” he said. “I suppose it could not have been otherwise, though that wasn’t my object in going to live there.”
“Well, tell us, then!” said Evelyn, rather impatiently. He had begun to smoke, and smoked in a most characteristic manner; that is to say, that in little more than a minute his cigarette was consumed down one side, and was a peninsula of charred paper down the other, while clouds of smoke ascended from it. Perceiving this, he instantly lit another one.
But Philip rose.
“Tell us afterwards, Tom,” he said. “Lady Ellington likes to play bridge, I know, as soon as dinner is over.”
Evelyn rose also.
“Ah, she is like me,” he said. “She wants to do things not soon, but immediately, Philip, how awfully pretty Miss Ellington is. Why wasn’t I told? I should like to paint her.”
Philip paused by the door.
“Really, do you mean that?” he said. “And have you got time? I hear you always have more orders than you can ever get through.”
Evelyn tossed his head with a quick, petulant gesture.
“You talk as if I was a tailor,” he said. “But you suggest to me the advisability of my getting apprentices to paint the uninteresting people for me, and I will sign them. That would satisfy a lot of them. Yes, I have more than I can do. But I could do Miss Ellington remarkably well. Shall I ask her to sit for me?”
“That would be rather original, the first time you saw her.”
“A good reason for doing it,” said Evelyn, hastily drinking another glass of port.
“But it would certainly give her a good reason for saying ‘No,’” remarked Philip.
Madge, it appeared, did not play bridge; her mother, at any rate, said she did not, and Evelyn Dundas, rather to his satisfaction, cut out. That feat happily accomplished, he addressed himself to Madge.
“Fancy a hermit playing bridge!” he said. “Does it not seem to you very inconsistent? Patience is the furthest he has any right to go.”
Madge got up.
“Patience, both in cards and in real life, seems to me a very poor affair,” she said. “How are we going to amuse ourselves while they play? Will you go out of the room while I think of something, and then you can come in and guess it?”
An amendment occurred to Evelyn.
“We might both go out,” he said. “It is deliciously warm; just out on to the terrace.”
“And when we come in they can guess where we have been,” said Madge.
The night, as he had said, was deliciously warm, and the moon, a day or two only from full, shone with a very clear light. Below them lay the dim, huddled woods, and beyond, shining like a streak of silver, slept the Thames. Somewhere far away a train was panting along its iron road, and to the left scattered lights showed where Pangbourne stood. Odours of flowers were wafted from the beds, and pale-winged moths now and then crossed the illuminated spaces of light thrown by the drawing-room window on to the gravel.
“Ah, what a pity to be indoors!” said the girl as they stepped out. “I suppose I must be of Gipsy blood; I always want to go somewhere.”
“Where particularly?” asked he.
“That doesn’t matter; the going is the point. If you asked me to go to the Black Hole of Calcutta I should probably say ‘Yes.’ What a pity we can’t go on the river!”
“Ah, let us do that!” said he.
Madge laughed.
“It would be quite unheard-of,” she said. “I don’t live in the New Forest like Mr. Merivale, and cast conventions aside. No, we will walk up and down a little, and then you shall go and play. Do you know, I am really so pleased to have met you I have admired your pictures so. Do you find it a bore having that sort of thing said to you?”
Evelyn thought over this for a moment.
“Well, I think my pictures bore me when they are done,” he said, “though the opinion of other people never does. A picture is – is like a cold in the head. It possesses you while it is there, and you have to throw it off. And when it is thrown off, one never thinks of it again. At least, I don’t.”
They had come to the end of the terrace, and the girl stopped as they turned.
“And then you do another. Ah, how delightful to know that probably to the end of your life you will have things to do!”
“I don’t think you would say that if you had to do them,” said he. “Yet, I don’t know. Of course creating a thing is the biggest fun in the world. But how one tears one’s hair over it!”
Madge looked at his thick black thatch.
“You seem to have got some left,” she remarked.
“Yes, but I’m looking thinner. Mrs. Home told me so. Oh, look at the moon! What a dreadful thing to say, too! But it really is out of drawing – it is far too big!”
“Perhaps we are far too small,” said she.
Evelyn shook his head.
“It is impossible to be small if that occurs to you,” he said.
They walked in silence after this for a dozen yards or so, Madge feeling, somehow, strangely attracted by her companion. There was nothing, it is true, particularly brilliant about his conversation; it was boyish rather than brilliant; but she felt, as most people did,