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Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 “Sick of what?”
“This.”
“I suppose it’s pretty difficult at home now?”
“Oh, well, you know it’s never been the same since Pepa died.”
This time it was Arnold that winced; he could not yet bear to hear
Pepa mentioned.
“It’s made the Doña a fanatic,” Concha continued, “and she never
was that before, you know. Who was it? Teresa, or some one, said
that English ivy had grown round Peter’s rock, and birds had made
their nest in it ... before. But now she’s absolutely rampantly Catholic
... you know, she wants to dedicate the house to the Sacred Heart of
Jesus and have little squares of stuff embroidered with it nailed on
all the doors....”
“Good Lord!”
“But, of course, Dad won’t hear of it.”
“Well, I don’t quite see what it’s got to do with him—if it makes
her happier,” and his voice became suddenly aggressive.
“And she’d do anything on earth to prevent either of us marrying a
Protestant ... after all, what do-o-oes it all matter? Lord, what fools
these mortals be!”
And Concha, who, for a few moments, had been completely
natural, once more turned into an English actress in a drawing-room
play.
“Um ... yes ...” said Arnold meditatively, sighing, and knocking out
the ashes of his pipe.
“Hulloa!” she suddenly drawled, as a plump, grinning, round-
faced, young man made his appearance on the loggia.
It was Eben Moore, son of the vicar and senior “snotty” on one of
His Majesty’s ships.
 As to his name—it was short for Ebenezer, which, as Mrs. Moore
continually told one, “has always been a name in my husband’s
family.... My husband, you know, is the youngest son of a youngest
son,” she would add with a humorously wry smile, as if there was
something at once glorious and regrettable in belonging to the Tribe
of Benjamin.
His face perceptibly fell as he caught sight of the two personable
men playing clock-golf on the lawn.
“Aow lor’! You didn’t tell me as what there was company,” he said,
imitating the local accent.
“Good God!” muttered Arnold, who found Eben’s humour
nauseating; and he slouched off to join Guy, who was writing letters
in the billiard-room.
“Got it?” said Concha, stretching out her hand and looking at him
through her eyelashes.
Eben giggled. “I say! It’s pretty hot stuff, you know.”
“E-e-eben! Don’t be a fool; hand it over.”
Eben, grinning from ear to ear, took a sealed envelope out of his
pocket and gave it to her, and having opened it, she began to read
its contents with little squirts of laughter.
From time immemorial, young ladies have had a fancy for
exercising their calligraphy and taste in copying elegant extracts into
an album; for instance, there is a Chinese novel, translated by an
abbé of the eighteenth century, which tells of ladies who, all day
long, sat in pagodas, copying passages from the classics in hands
like the flight of a dragon. Harriet Smith, too, had an album into
which she and Emma copied acrostics.
Concha owned to the same harmless weakness; though the
extracts copied into her album could perhaps scarcely be qualified as
“elegant”: there was, among other things, an unpublished play by W.
S. Gilbert—(“What I love about our English humour—Punch, and W.
S. Gilbert—is that it never has anything ... well, questionable,” Mrs.
Moore would sometimes exclaim to the Doña), Wilke’s Essay on
Woman, and Poor but Honest.
One day, Teresa, happening to come into Concha’s room, had
caught sight of the album, and asked if she might look at it.
“Oh, do, by all means,” Concha had drawled, partly from defiance,
partly from curiosity.
Impassively, Teresa had read it through; and then had said, “I’d
advise you to ask Arnold the next time he’s in Cambridge to find you
an old copy of Law’s Call to a Devout Life—that man in the market-
place might have one—beautifully bound, if possible. Then take out
the pages and bind this in the cover.”
Concha had done so; and if she had been as relentless an
observer of Teresa as Teresa was of her, she might have detected in
what had just transpired a touch on Teresa’s part of under-stated,
nevertheless unmistakable, cabotinage.
The contents of the sealed envelope, which was causing her so
much amusement, was a copy of the song, Clergymen’s Daughters
that on his last leave she had persuaded Eben on his return to his
ship to make for her from the gun-room collection, and which he
had not on their previous meeting had an opportunity of giving her.
But she was not aware that there are three current versions of this
song, corresponding to the X, the double X, and triple X on the
labels of whisky bottles, and that it was only the double X strength
that Eben had given her.

4
After luncheon most of them played Snooker, to the
accompaniment of the gramophone, Anna and Jasper taking turns in
changing the records.
Eben had hurt his hand, so he sat and talked to Teresa on the
sofa.
 It was a fact that had always both puzzled and annoyed her that
he evidently enjoyed talking to her.
“Have you read Compton Mackenzie’s last?” he asked.
Why would every one persist in talking to her about books? And
why did he not say, “the last Compton Mackenzie?” She decided that
his diction had been influenced by frequenting his mother’s Women’s
Institute and hearing continually of “little Ernest, Mrs. Brown’s
second,” or “Mrs. Kett’s last.”
“No, I’m afraid I haven’t.”
“I’ll lend it to you—I’m not sure if it’s as good as the others,
though ... it’s funny, but I’m very fastidious about novels; the only
thing I really care about is style—I’m a regular sensualist about fine
English.”
“Are you? Perhaps you will like this, then—‘I remember Father
Benson saying with his fascinating little stutter: He has such a g-g-
gorgeously multitudinous mind’?”
Eben stared at her, quite at a loss as to what she was talking
about.
“It sounds ... it sounds topping. What is it from?”
“I don’t quite remember.”
But it wasn’t fair, she decided. Because she happened to date from
the feeling of flatness and disgust aroused in her by this sentence,
read in a magazine years ago, the awakening in her of the power of
distinguishing between literature and journalism, it did not follow
that it was exceptionally frightful or that other people ought to react
to it in the same way that she had. And yet, “gorgeous palaces,”
“multitudinous, seas incarnadine”—the words themselves were
beautiful enough in all conscience. Anyhow, it was not Eben’s fault;
though “a regular sensualist for fine English....” Good God!
“Do you want Hee—hee—Heeweeine Melodies, or Way Down in
Georgia, or Abide With Me? Arnold! Do you want Hee-wee-ween
Melodies, or Way Down in Georgia, or Abide With Me? Do say!”
yelled Anna from the gramophone.
“People are inclined to think that sailors don’t go in for reading,
and that sort of thing, but as a matter of fact ... our Commander, for
instance, has a topping library, and all really good books—history
mostly.”
Rows upon rows of those volumes, the paper of which is so good,
the margins so wide, but out of which, if opened, one of the
illustrations is certain to fall—Lady Hamilton, or Ninon de l’Enclos, or
Madame Récamier; now Teresa knew who read these books.
“Silly Billy! Silly Billy! Silly Billy!” yelled Anna and Jasper in chorus
as Rory missed a straight pot on the blue; it was their way of
expressing genuine friendliness to their playmate of the morning.
On and on went Eben’s voice; scratch, grate, scratch, grate, went
the gramophone.
The light began to grow colder and thinner.
“Snookered for a pint!”
“Be a sportsman now....”
“I say!... he’s done it!”
“I say, you’re a devil of a fellow, Munroe!”
The game ended and they put up their cues.
“Now then, you two, what are you up to? Anna, you’re a hard-
hearted little thing; why aren’t you crying that I didn’t win?”
At which sally of Rory’s the children doubled up with delighted
laughter.
They all seemed to be feeling the tedium of the period between
luncheon and tea, and lolled listlessly in chairs, or sat on the edge of
the billiard-table, swinging their legs.
“Anna, darling, put on one of the Hawaiian melodies—it’s among
those there, I’m sure,” said Concha.
 After several false starts, and some scratchings of the needle (it
was Jasper’s turn to put on the record), the hot-scented tune began
to pervade the room.
“That’s the sort of tune that on hot nights must have been played
to Oberon by his little Indian catamite,” said Guy, sitting down on the
sofa beside Teresa.
She smiled a little absently; the Hawaiian melody was like a frame,
binding the room and its inmates into a picture. Concha, her eyes
fixed and dreamy; Rory, intent on a puzzle—shaking little rolling
pellets into holes or something; Arnold sitting on the edge of the
billiard-table while Anna lit his pipe for him; Jasper motionless, for
once, his eyes fixed intently on the needle of the gramophone; David
standing by the door gazing gravely at Concha, looking not unlike a
Spanish Knight who carries in his own veins more than a drop of the
Moorish blood that it is his holy mission to spill; Eben standing by
the fireplace, a broad grin on his face, his hands on his hips,
swaying slightly, in time with the music ... what was it he was like?
Teresa suddenly remembered that it was the principal boy in a little
local pantomime they had all gone to one Christmas—she evidently
could not sing, because during the choruses she would stand silent,
grinning and swaying as Eben was doing now.
The view was painted on the windows—a pietà as nobly coloured
as that of Avignon; for, in spite of flowers and fruits and sunshine,
on the knees of the earth the year lay dying.
Teresa was thinking, “The present frozen into the past—that is art.
At this moment things are looking as if they were the past. That is
why I am feeling as if I were having an adventure—because the
present and the past have become one.”
Squeak! Burr! Gurr! went the gramophone.
“Stop it, Jasper! Stop it!”
“Beastly noise! It reminds me of the dentist.”
The record was removed.
 “Très entraînant—as the deaf bourgeoise said after having listened
to the Dead March in Saul,” said Guy; he had suddenly invented this
Sam Wellerism in the middle of the tune, and had hardly been able
to wait till the end to come out with it.
Then Anna put on a fox-trot, and Rory and Concha, Arnold and
Guy, in the narrow space between the billiard-table and
gramophone, hopped and wriggled and jumped—one could not call
it dancing.
“Now then, Munroe,” cried Rory, when it was over, “You’re such
hot stuff at billiards—let’s see what you can do on the light
fantastic.”
“Yes, do, Mr. Munroe,” and Concha stood swaying before him,
flushed and provocative.
“I’m afraid ... I don’t ... well, if you’ve got a tango here ... I used
to try my hand at it in Africa.”
“Let’s see ... put on the Tango de Rêve, Anna. Got it?”
David hesitated a moment; then, as if coming to a sudden
resolution, he clasped her, and stood waiting for the bar to end; then
they began to dance, and their souls seemed to leave their bodies,
leaving them empty to the tune, which gradually informed them till
they and it were one; a few short steps, then a breathless halt, a
few more steps, another halt ... then letting themselves go a little,
then another halt; their faces tense and mask-like ... truly a strange
dance, the Tango, speaking the broken, taciturn, language of
passion:

Thanked be fortune: it hath been otherwise:

Twenty times better; but once especial
In thin array: after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown did from her shoulders fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small....
 Grrr ... went the gramophone—the spell was snapt.
“Bravo!” cried the audience, clapping; while ’Snice began to bark,
and the children to jump up and down and squeal.
“You dance divinely!” cried Concha, flushed and laughing.
David blushed, frowned, muttered something inaudible, and left
the room.
They exchanged looks of surprise.
“Hot stuff!” said Rory; and they settled down to desultory,
frivolous, Anglo-Saxon chatter—not unlike fox-trots, thought Teresa.
She shut her eyes, half mesmerised by the din of all the voices
talking together.
The talk, like a flight of birds, squeezed itself out into a long thin
line, compressed itself into a compact phalanx, was now diagonal,
now round, now square, now all three at once, according to the
relative position of the talkers.
“Don’t you love Owen Nares? I love his English so—I love the way
he says, ‘I’m so jolly glad to meet you.’” “I knew Middlesex would be
first—it was only poetic justice to Plum Warner.” “I don’t care a damn
what the Nation or what the New Statesman says—I happen to
know....” “Of course, with Jimmy Wilde it’s all grit and science—he
ought to do him in every time.” “Is it true that Leslie Henson wears
spectacles off the stage?” “How much do you think I gave for it?
Thirty bob. A jeweller I showed it to in town said it was the very
finest Baltic amber—you see, I got it out there.” “I know! My cousin,
Guy’s brother, when he was going out to Tin-Sin thought it would be
nice to brighten up China, so he took out an assortment of the
merriest socks you ever saw in your life, and when he was killed my
aunt handed them over to me, and I had ’em dyed black....” “Very
nayce, too!” “What are you saying about socks? I wish to God some
one would mend mine!” “Well, I got a bit of amber in an old shop in
Norwich....” “He’s a priceless little man ... he came out and amused
us at the front.”
 “Tea time!” said Arnold, looking at his watch and yawning.
“Tea time!” the others echoed; and they all got up.
“But look here, Miss Concha,” said Rory, “if you love Owen Nares
so much, why not come up and see him? It’s quite a good show ...
you’ll look at him and I’ll look at the lady—though you’ll probably
have the best of it. What do you think, Arnold? We could dine first at
the Berkeley or somewhere ... well, look here, that’s settled; we
must fix up a night.”
Teresa felt a sudden and, to her, most unusual craving for the life
that smells of lip-salve and powder, where in bright, noisy
restaurants “every shepherd tells his tale ...” where “the beautiful
Miss Brabazons” laugh and dance and triumph eternally.

5
After tea they decided to go a walk, and escort Eben part of his
way home—a delightful plan, it seemed to Anna, Jasper, and ’Snice;
but to Anna and Jasper the Doña said firmly, “No, my darlings; I
want you.”
Their faces fell; they knew it meant what Nanny, who was a
Protestant, called “a Bible lesson from kind Granny.”
Needless to say, the fact that these lessons were opposed to the
wishes—nay, to the express command—of Dr. Sinclair, was powerless
in deterring the Doña from attempting to save her grandchildren’s
souls; and, even if she failed in the attempt, they should at any rate
not be found in the condition of criminal ignorance of the children of
one of Pepa’s friends who had asked why there were always “big
plus-signs” on the tops of churches.
The Doña was not merely a Catholic; she was also a Christian—
that is to say, though she did not always follow his precepts, she had
an intense personal love of Christ.
 Besides the shadowy figure struggling towards “projection”
through the ritual of the Church’s year, there are more concrete
representations on which the Catholic can feed his longings.
The Doña’s love of Christ dated from the first Seville Holy Week
that she could remember.
She had sat with her mother and her little brother, Juanito,
watching the pasos carried past on the shoulders of the cofradias ...
many a beautiful Virgin, velvet-clad, pearl-hung, like Isabella the
Catholic. Then had come a group of more than life-sized figures—a
young, bearded man, his face as white as death and flecked with
blood, the veins of his hands as knotted as the cords that bound
them, surrounded by half a dozen fiendish-looking men, fists
clenched as if about to strike him, some clutching stones in their
upraised hands, all with faces contorted with hatred.
“Look! Look! Who are these wicked men?” cried Juanito.
“These are the Jews,” answered their mother.
“And who is the poor man?” asked the Doña.
“Jésus Christos.”
Juanito, his little fists clenched, was all for flying at the plaster
bullies; but the Doña was howling for pity of the pobre caballero.
Then, at Christmas time in every church there was a crèche in
which lay the Infant Jesus, his small, waxen hands stretched out in
welcome, his face angelically sweet.
Also; at different times, for instance, when the Gospel was read in
Spanish, during her preparation for her first Communion, the
abstract presentation of the Liturgy had been supplemented with
stories from His life on earth, and quotations from His own words.
Indeed, the sources and nature of the Doña’s knowledge of Jesus
was not unlike that of some old peasant woman of Palestine. The old
woman, say, would, from time to time, ride into Nazareth on her
donkey, carrying a basket of grapes and olives to sell in the market:
and perhaps, if the basket should have fallen and scattered the fruit,
or if she had a pitcher to fill at the fountain, she may have received
a helping hand or a kindly word from the gentlest and strangest-
spoken young man that had ever crossed her path.
Then one day she may have paid her first visit to Jerusalem—
perhaps a lawsuit over a boundary taking her there, or the need to
present her orphaned grandchild in the Temple—and have seen this
same young man led through the streets, bound with cords, while
the populace shouted, “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” and have returned
to her remote little farm with an ache in her heart.
And, as the years would go by, from the tales of wayfarers, from
rumours blown from afar, she might come to believe that somehow
or other the young man had died for the poor—for her; had died and
risen again. And gradually, as with the years his legend grew, she
would come to look upon him as a fairy-being, akin to the old
sanctities of the countryside, swelling her grapes, plumping her
olives, and keeping away locusts and blight. But, towards the end of
her life, business may have taken her again to Nazareth, where,
hearing that the young man’s mother was still alive, something may
have compelled her to go and visit her. And in the little room behind
the carpenter’s shop, where the other sons and grandsons were
planing and sawing, and singing to ancient melodies of the desert
songs of plenty and vengeance and the Messiah, the two old women
would talk together in hushed tones of Him who so many years ago
had been crucified and buried. And through the mother’s anecdotes
of His childhood and tearful encomiums, “He was ever a good kind
son to me,”—the fairy-being would once more become human and
ponderable—the gentlest young man that had ever crossed her path.
So far, the Doña had not been very successful in bringing Anna
and Jasper to their Lord.
For instance, when she had told them the story of Christ among
the doctors, Anna had merely remarked coldly and reprovingly, “He
must have been a very goody-goody, grown-uppish sort of boy.”
 This particular evening the Doña had decided to consecrate to an
exegesis of the doctrine of Transsubstantiation.
When the Doña said that at a certain point of the mass the bread
turned to the actual flesh and blood and bones of Jesus, Anna’s face
assumed an expression of dogged scepticism, and having decided
that she must ask Teresa about it, continued her own thoughts:
Mamselle, who gave her French lessons in Cambridge, had fired her
imagination with accounts of the bouktis they used to have in the
Surbiton family where she was once governess—“vraiment, c’était
passionant; je me demande pourquoi Dr. Sinclair n’organise pas des
bouktis à Trinité—ça serait très amusant pour les jeunes gens....” It
was a good idea! All the people with buried names of books, and
having to guess. Oh, yes!... one could go with a lot of little lambs’
tails sewed on one’s frock ... yes, but how was one going to get in
the “of Shakespeare”.... Of course ... what a goose she was not to
have realised it before ... bouktis was Mamselle’s way of saying
“book-teas” ... that’s what the parties were called—“book-teas.”
Thus Anna; as to Jasper—if one could reduce the instantaneous
and fantastic picture produced on his mind to a definite consecutive
statement, it would read something like this: By the powerful spells
of a clergyman, who was also a magician, pieces of bread were
turned into tiny men—long-robed, bearded, and wearing golden
straw hats of which nothing but the brim could be seen from in
front. Then the clergyman distributed to every one at the party one
of the tiny men, to be their very own. They each, forthwith,
swallowed their tiny man, and he made himself a little nest in their
stomachs, whence he could be summoned to be played with
whenever they liked.
He began jumping up and down, his body trembling like that of an
excited terrier.
“Oh, I want, I want, I want some of that bread,” he cried. “Oh,
when can I have it, Doña? Oh, I can’t wait!”
 Needless to say, the Doña was not in the least taken in—she did
not take it for a sign of Grace, nor did it seem to her in the least
touching; but she knew it would strike Jollypot as being both, and
the picture she foresaw that the incident would produce on her—that
of the innocent little pagan calling aloud to God for the spiritual food
that was his birthright—was one that the Doña felt would be both
soothing, and expressive of the way in which she would have liked
the incident to have appeared to herself.
A perfect household of slaves would include a sentimentalist and a
cynic by means of whom the lord, whatever his own temperament,
could express vicariously whatever interpretation of events was the
one that harmonised with his plans or mood of the moment.
It was as she expected; Jollypot’s eyes filled with tears, and she
murmured, “Poor little man! poor little man!”
And she was long haunted by the starving cry of the innocent, “I
want that bread! I want that bread!”

6
The walkers set out in the direction of the view, strolling in a
bunch down the grass path between the border.
“You know, I don’t really like these herbaceous things—they aren’t
tame. I like flowers you can make a pet of, roses and violets and
that sort of thing,” said Rory, looking towards Teresa.
She did not meet his eye, feeling in no mood to feed his vanity by
sympathising with his fancies.
From the village to their right rang out the chimes for evensong.
“Would Mrs. Moore mind if you missed church, Eben?” asked
Concha.
“She would be grieved,” grinned Eben. “You see, Lady Norton
wasn’t there this morning, but she always comes in the evening, and
the mater wants her to see my manly beauty.”
 This remark, thought Teresa, showed a certain acuteness and
humour; but all Concha’s contemporaries seemed to have these
qualities, and yet, it meant so little, existed side by side with such an
absence of serious emotion, such an ignoring of intellectual beauty,
such a—such a—such an un-Platonic turn of mind. Probably every
one in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—country parsons,
grocers’ apprentices, aldermen, fine ladies—had only to take up a
goose’s quill and write as they talked to produce the most exquisite
prose: witness the translation of the Bible by a body of obscure, and
(considering the fatuity of some of their mistranslations) half-witted,
old divines. Perhaps the collective consciousness of humanity was
silently capturing, one after the other, the outposts of the
intelligence, so that some day we should all share in a flat and
savourless communism of apprehension.
But then the English, as a whole, had lost the power of writing
automatically fine prose ... oh, it was not worth bothering about!
When they got out of the grounds of Plasencia, they broke up into
couples and trios—Rory moving to one side of Concha, David, his
back looking rather dogged, to the other. Arnold had forgotten his
distaste for Eben in a heated discussion of the battle of Jutland.
Teresa found herself walking with Guy.
To the right lay a field of stubble, ruddled with poppies, and to the
right of that a little belt of trees. Teresa had long noticed how in
autumn scarlet is the oriflamme of the spectrum; for round it the
other colours rally at their gayest and most gallant. For instance, the
dull red roofs of the cluster of barns to the right glowed like rubies,
if one’s glance, before resting on them, travelled through the poppy-
shot stubble; and, following the same route, her eye could detect
autumnal tints in the belt of trees, which otherwise would have been
imperceptible.
“How lovely poppies would be if they weren’t so ubiquitous,” said
Guy. “I always think of poppies when I see all the Renoirs in the Rue
de la Boétie in Paris—every second shop’s a picture dealer, and they
all have at least two Renoirs in their window—dreams of beauty if
there weren’t so many of ’em. And yet, I don’t know—that very
exuberance, the feeling of an exquisite, delicate, yet unexigeant
flower springing up in profusion in the lightest and poorest soil may
be a quality of their charm.”
Teresa said nothing; but her brows slightly contracted.
Now they were walking past one of the few fields of barley that
were still standing—all creamy and steaming ... oh, dear, that simile
of Guy’s, in one of his poems, between a field of barley and a great
bowl of some American patent cereal on a poster ... at any moment
there might appear on the sky the gigantic, grinning face of the
cereal-fiend, whose sole function was to grin with anticipative greed,
and brandish a spoon on the point of being dipped into the foaming,
smoking brew ... disgusting; and maddening that it should cling to
her memory.
“Well, I suppose long ago the Danes and Saxons fought battles
here; and the buried hatchet has turned the wild flowers red ... or
does iron in the soil turn flowers blue?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said Teresa coldly.
They walked on in silence for a few minutes.

As through the land at eve we went

And plucked the ripened ears,
My wife and I....

“My wife and I ... fell out ... how does it go?”
“Not like that, Guy,” said Teresa, with a short laugh.
Guy blushed to the roots of his yellow hair; he had a secret
handicap of which he was horribly ashamed—practically no ear for
rhythm; and it was partly the lameness of his verses that had made
him fall back on a poetry that had neither rhyme nor rhythm.
 When he was absent from Teresa—even during a few hours—his
idea of her would undergo a swift change; though remaining aloof,
she would turn into a wonderfully sympathetic lady—remote, but not
inaccessible; a lady eminently suited to moving gracefully among the
Chippendale, coloured prints, and Queen Anne lacquer of his dining-
room in St. James’s Street; quite at home, also, among the art nègre
and modern French pictures of his drawing-room; receiving his mots
with a whimsically affectionate smile; in society bringing out all that
was most brilliant in him—existing, in short, merely for his own
greater glory.
It took a very short absence from her—for instance, the interval
between dinner and breakfast the next morning—for this idea of her
to oust completely the real one. Then he would see her again, and
would again be bruised and chilled by the haughty coldness masked
by her low, gentle voice, her many silences; and the idea would be
shattered; to come together again the minute he was out of her
presence.
“Of course! You would be incapable of appreciating Tennyson,” he
said angrily.
“Why? Because I venture to hint that your version doesn’t scan?”
“Oh, it’s not only that,” he almost screamed; “it’s really because
you think it’s sentimental to quote Tennyson. Can’t you see that
simple, trite words like these are the only ones suited to expressing
the threadbare yet exquisite emotion that one feels when one walks
through autumn fields on Sunday evening?”
“Yes; but why not make those simple, trite words scan?... and look
here, Guy,” she added with unusual heat, “it seems to me perfectly
absurd to admire Tennyson and crab Wordsworth. It makes one
wonder if any of your literary tastes are sincere. Everything you
dislike in Wordsworth is in Tennyson too—only in Tennyson the
prosaicness and flatness, though it may be better expressed, is
infinitely more ignoble. I simply don’t understand this attitude to
Wordsworth—it makes me think that all you care about is verbal
dexterity. I don’t believe you know what real poetry means.”
Poor Guy! How could he know that her irritation had really nothing
to do with his attitude to Wordsworth, that, in fact, he and his
poetics were merely a scapegoat?
Shattered and sick at heart, he felt that his fears of the previous
evening about Oscar Wilde and brilliance had been ruthlessly
confirmed.
She looked at him; he actually had tears in his eyes.
“I ... I seem to have lost my temper,” she said apologetically, “but
it was only ... I’ve got rather a headache, as a matter of fact, and
what you said yesterday about Wordsworth has rankled—he’s my
favourite poet. And you know I belong in taste to an older
generation; I simply don’t understand modern things. But, as a
matter of fact, I often like your poetry very much.”
This mollified him for the moment.
“I say!” he exclaimed suddenly, walking more quickly, “other
people seem to be quarrelling.”
Sure enough: the trio ahead was standing still; Concha’s lips were
twitching and she was looking self-conscious; Rory’s eyebrows were
arched in surprise; and David, glowering and thunderous, was
standing with clenched fists. As Teresa and Guy came up to them he
was saying fiercely: “... and I’m just sick to death of lairds and that
... and if you want to know, I’m heir-apparent to Munroe of
Auchenballoch,” and he laughed angrily.
“You’re a lucky chap then ... Auchenballoch is a very fine place,”
said Rory in an even voice.
“What’s up?” said Guy.
“I seem to have annoyed Mr. Munroe, quite unintentionally,”
answered Rory.
Slowly, painfully, David blushed under his dark skin.
 “I beg your pardon,” he murmured.
Teresa felt a sudden wave of intense sympathy for David, and of
equally intense annoyance against Rory; he had, doubtless, been
again babbling about his relations—“old Lionel Fane,” “the beautiful
Miss Brabazons,” and the rest of them—that was boring enough, in
all conscience; but if, as was probably the case, David had been left
pointedly out of the conversation, it would become, into the bargain,
insulting.
And under his easy manners, Rory was so maddeningly
patronising—especially to David, with his, “I say! Dashing fellah!”
and, “Now then, Munroe, let’s see what you can do.” But ... it was
possible that David’s irritation was primarily caused by far more vital
things. ’Snice there, lying on his back, his tongue lolling out, his eyes
glassy, completely unconscious of the emotional storm raging above
him, would probably, if they could have been translated into his own
language, have understood David’s feelings better than Teresa and
sympathised with them warmly.
“I’m rather tired—do take me home, Mr. Munroe,” said Teresa.
He looked at her gratefully.
For some minutes they walked in silence, both embarrassed,
Teresa turning over in her mind possible conversational openings.
“You have been in South Africa, haven’t you?” “Do you play golf?”
But she could not get them out.
What she said finally was, “What did you mean exactly last night
when you said to my mother that in times like the War one sees the
star?”
“I mean the Star of Bethlehem—they’re seasons of Epiphany,” he
answered.
“But how do you mean exactly?”
“Just that ... the Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles.” He said
the words slowly, with gusto, as if to him they had not yet become
threadbare. “There were a lot of chaps converted to Catholicism
during the War,” he went on.
“Were you?”
“Yes.”
He paused, and again they were silent. Then he said, “I was
brought up a Presbyterian, but I was never interested in that, I
didn’t think of religion at all. But during the War there were several
chaps that were Catholics in my regiment, and I used sometimes to
go to mass with them, or benediction, because it was quieter in
there than anywhere else. Then their padre began talking to me,
and I saw that once you had taken the plunge it was all shipshape
and logical. But the plunge was the thing—that seemed to me to
take a lot of nerve and faith.”
Again he paused, then went on in a lower voice, “Well, it was a
wee church, very old, in a village behind the lines, and one day mass
was being celebrated there, and just after the Consecration the gas
gong and klaxons sounded—that meant we had all to retire in
double quick time behind the gas zone. The priest wrapped up the
Host in the corporals and hurried off with the rest of us. When the
scare was over and he went back to the church—the corporals were
soaked in blood.”
The last words were said scarcely above a whisper.
Well, there was no Protestant nonsense here; this was the Holy
Mother herself in all her crudity.
Teresa had not the slightest idea what to say; and decided that
she had better say nothing at all.
Yes, but it was not the bleeding corporals, really, that had done it.
She remembered a curious experience she had once had when
waiting to be fetched home in the car by her father from some
Chelsea lodgings where she had been spending a fortnight. Her box
was packed, she was all ready dressed for the drive; she had
nothing to do but to wait in a little valley sheltered from Time, out of
the beat of the Recording Angel, her old activities switched off, her
new activities not yet switched on. Then the practical relation
between her and the shabby familiar furniture suddenly snapped,
and she looked at it with new eyes—the old basket-chair, the horse-
hair sofa, the little table on which was an aspidistra in a pot—they
were now merely arrangements of planes and lines, and, as such,
startlingly significant. For the first time she was looking at them
æsthetically, and so novel was the sensation that it felt like a
mystical experience. The Beatific Vision ... may it not be this
æsthetic vision turned on spiritual formula? A shabby threadbare
creed suddenly seen as something simple, solid, monumental?
Tolstoy must have been reared on the Gospels; but suddenly when
he was already middle-aged he thought he had made a discovery
which would revolutionise the world; and this was that one must
love one’s neighbour as oneself. It was merely that he had, so to
speak for the first time seen the chairs and tables æsthetically. Yes
... heliacal periods, when the star becomes visible. Mr. Munroe had
said that he had never before thought about religion at all; and it
was a mere chance that the room in which he first saw the tables
and chairs should be hung with crucifixes and Catholic prints.
The bells had stopped ringing for evensong, the sun was very near
setting. Caroline, the donkey, gave tongue from the paddock of
Plasencia—a long, drawn-out wail prefacing a series of ee-aws.
“That means rain,” said David.
“Caroline sings nothing but Handel,” said Teresa, “a long recitative
before the aria.”
For a few seconds David looked puzzled, and then threw back his
head, and, for the first time since he had been at Plasencia, laughed
aloud.
“That’s offly good,” he cried.
But Caroline was not the only singer of Handel. As they crossed
the lawn, Jollypot could be heard singing to the cottage piano in the
old schoolroom, For He shall feed His flock like a Shepherd.
 Among the many traces of Protestantism that had clung to her
was a craving for hymns at dusk on Sundays; but being debarred
from Hymns Ancient and Modern she had to fall back upon Handel.
And He shall feed His flock like a she-e-e-e-e-perd.
Her small, sweet voice, like the silver hammer of a gnome, beat
out the words of the prophet, to which Handel’s sturdy melody—so
square, so steady on its feet—lent an almost insolent confidence.
And He shall feed His flock like a she-e-e-e-e-perd....
“Is that—is that the wee lady?” asked David, gently.
Teresa nodded.
They stood still and listened; Teresa was smiling, a little sadly: the
old optimists, Isaiah and Handel, had certainly succeeded in
cozening Jollypot’s papa; for on a living worth £200 a year and no
private means he had begotten seven daughters. Nevertheless, the
little voice went on unfalteringly.
And He shall feed His flock like a she-e-e-e-e-perd.
David glanced at the slim, graceful young woman standing beside
him, looking gentler than she usually did, but still very remote.
She, and Jollypot’s singing, and the scent of roses, and the great
stretch behind them of Sabbath-hushed English fields, brought back,
somehow or other, one of the emotions of his boyhood. Not being
introspective, he had never analysed it, but he knew that it was
somehow connected with a vague dissatisfaction with his lot, and
with a yearning for the “gentry,” and hence, because when he was a
boy he thought they were the same thing, a yearning also for the
English. He remembered how badly he had had it one Sunday
morning when he had played truant from the service in his father’s
church, and had slunk into the “wee Episcopalian chapel” in the
grounds of the laird. The castle had been let that summer to an
English judge and his family, and the judge’s “high-English” voice,
monotonous, refined, reading the lessons in a sort of chant,
pronouncing when as wen, and poor as paw, had thrilled him as the
dramatic reading of his father had never done. Then some years
later he had slipped into evensong, and the glossy netted “bun” at
the nape of the neck of Miss Stewart (the laird’s daughter), and her
graceful genuflections at the name of Jesus had thrilled him in the
same way. Finally the emotion had crystallised into dreams of a tall,
kind, exquisitely tidy lady, with a “high-English” voice and a rippling
laugh, sitting in a tent during the whole of a June afternoon scoring
at the English game of cricket ... or at a school treat, standing tall
and smiling, her arms stretched out, her hands clasped in those of
her twin pillar, warbling:

Oranges and lemons

Sing the bells of St. Clement’s,

while under the roof of arms scampered the hot, excited children.
Anyway, it was an emotion that gave him a strange, sweet
nausea.
As to Teresa; as if her mind had caught a reflection from his, she
was pondering the line:

The ancient English dower of inward happiness.

Wordsworth mourned it as a thing of the past; but had it ever been?

Did Jollypot possess it? Who could say. Certainly none of the rest of
them did.

7
David left early the next morning. Evidently from him, too, Concha
had received an invitation to a dinner and a play, for as they said
good-bye she said, “Well then, Thursday, 16th, at the Savoy—it will
be divine.”
 Rory did not leave till after tea.
Teresa’s offer of sleeping, owing to the shortage of rooms, in her
father’s dressing-room during the week-end, had been accepted, and
Rory had been put into her bedroom; when she went up to dress for
dinner on Monday night she had noticed, on going near the bed, a
smell which seemed familiar. Suddenly she realised that it was the
smell of Rory’s hair-wash—the housemaid had actually forgotten to
change the sheets.
Teresa had flushed, and her heart had begun to beat in an odd,
fluttering way; but she went down to dinner without ringing for the
housemaid.
When she came up for the night the smell was still there. She
undressed, and stood for some seconds by the bed, her eyes shut,
her hands clenched; and then, blushing crimson, all over her face
and neck, and, flinging on her dressing-gown, driven by some
strange instinct, she flew to Concha’s room.
Concha’s light was out. She walked up to the bed and gently
shaking her said, “Concha! Concha! May I sleep with you? They’ve
forgotten to change the sheets on my bed.”
“Sheets? What sheets?” said Concha in a sleepy voice.
“In my room ... you know Captain Dundas has been sleeping
there.”
“Poor darling, how filthy! Get in,” and Concha, so as to leave room
for her, rolled over to one side.
Τὸ συγγενές τοι δεινόν, close physical kinship is a mysterious
thing; for, however much they may think they dislike each other, it
nearly always entails what can only be called a bodily affection
between the members it unites.
For instance, since Pepa’s death, Concha’s was the only plate
Teresa would not have shrunk from eating off, Concha’s the only
clothes she would not have shrunk from wearing.
That night they fell asleep holding each other’s hands.
 CHAPTER IV
1
The night that Teresa and Concha spent so affectionately in the
same bed had no effect on their relationship: Concha continued
flinging herself, angrily, violently, against Teresa’s stony stare.
If they happened to be alone in the room when the post arrived
and there was a letter for Concha, she would read it through with
knit brows, exclaiming under her breath the while; then she would
re-read it and, laying it down, would gaze into the fire, apparently
occupied with some grave problem of conduct; finally, springing to
her feet with an air of having taken a final and irrevocable decision,
she would violently tear up the letter, and fling the fragments into
the fire.
The letter would probably be from her friend, Elfrida Penn, and
may have contained some slight cause for anxiety, as Elfrida was an
hysterical young woman and one apt to mismanage her love-affairs;
but Teresa, sitting staring at the comedy through half-closed eyes
with fascinated irritation, would be certain that the letter contained
nothing but an announcement of Paris models, or the ticket for a
charity ball.
Teresa felt like some one of presbyopic and astigmatic sight,
doomed to look fixedly all day long at a very small object at very
close quarters; and this feeling reached an unusual degree of
exacerbation on the day that Concha went up to London to dine with
Rory Dundas. At seven o’clock she began to follow every stage of
her toilette; the bath cloudy with salts, a bottle of which she was
sure to have taken up in her dressing-case; then the silk stockings
drawn on—“oh damn that Parker! She’s sent me a pair with a
ladder”; silk shift, stays, puffing out her hair, mouth full of gilt hair-
pins; again and again pressing the bell till the chambermaid came to
fasten up her gown; on with her evening cloak and down into the
hall where Rory would be standing waiting in an overcoat, a folded-
up opera hat in his hand, his hair very sleek from that loathsome
stuff of his—“Hulloooah!” “Hulloa! Hulloa! I say ... some frock!” and
then all through dinner endless topical jokes.
Oh it was unbearably humiliating ... and how she longed for Pepa:
“Teresa darling! You must be mad. He really isn’t good enough, you
know. I’m sure he never opens a book, and I expect he’s
disgustingly bloodthirsty about the Germans. But if you really like
him we must arrange something—what a pity May-Week is such a
long way off.”
What did she see in him? He was completely without intellectual
distinction; he had a certain amount of fancy, of course, but fancy
was nothing—

Tell me where is Fancy bred?

Not in the heart
Nor in the head

nearly all young Englishmen had fancy—a fancy fed by Alice in

Wonderland, and the goblin arabesques on the cover of Punch; a
certain romantic historical sense too that thrills to Puck of Pook’s Hill
and the Three Musketeers—oh yes, and, unlike Frenchmen, they
probably all cherish a hope that never quite dies of one day playing
Anthony to some astonishingly provocative lady—foreign probably,
passionate and sophisticated as the heroine of Three Weeks,
mysterious as Rider Haggard’s She. But all that is just part of the
average English outfit—national, ubiquitous, undistinguished, like a
sense of humour and the proverbial love of fair play.
Yes; their minds were sterile, frivolous ... un-Platonic—that was
the word for expressing the lack she felt in the emotional life of the
Rorys, the Ebens, and all the rest of that crew; un-Platonic, because
they could not make myths. For them the shoemaker at his last, the
potter at his wheel, the fishwives of the market-place, new-born
babies and dead men, never suddenly grew transparent, allowing to
glimmer through them the contours of a stranger world. For them
Dionysus, whirling in his frantic dance, never suddenly froze into the
still cold marble of Apollo.
Concha came back from her outing uncommunicative and rather
cross. She was evidently irritated by the unusual eagerness shown
by the Doña with regard to her coming dinner with David Munroe.

One day Anna tackled Teresa over the doctrine of

Transubstantiation.
“I’ve never believed in fairies and things,” she said, “and this
sounds much more untruer—is it true?”
Teresa looked at her square, sensible little face—though without
the humour, so ridiculously like Harry’s in shape and expression—and
her heart sank.
What could she say?
Einstein—Bergson—Unamuno ... their theories were supposed to
provide a loophole.
She began to mutter idiotically:

“Una—muno—mena—mo,
Catch a nigger by his toe.”

“But is it true?” persisted Anna.

“Darling, just give me a minute to think,” pleaded Teresa; and she
set about reviewing her own attitude to her faith.
Whatever the confessors may say, Catholicism has nothing to do
with dogma ... no, no, that’s not quite it, dogma is a very important
element, but in spite of not accepting it one can still be a Catholic.
Catholicism is a form of art; it arouses an æsthetic emotion—an
emotion of ambivalence; because like all great art it at once repels
and attracts. When people confronted her with its intellectual
absurdities, she felt as she did, when, at an exhibition of modern
painting, they exclaimed: “but whoever saw hands like that?” or
“why hasn’t he given her a nose?”
Of course, this peculiar æsthetic emotion is not to be found in
every manifestation of Catholicism—it has to be sought for; for
instance, it is in the strange pages at the beginning of Newman’s
Apologia, where, in his hushed emaciated English, he tells how, in
his childhood in a remote village, never having seen any of the
insignia of Rome, when dreaming over his lessons he would cover
the pages of his copy-books with rosaries and sacred hearts. And,
when sitting one evening in the cemetery at the bottom of the hill on
which stands Siena, she had got the emotion very strongly from the
contrast between the lovely Tuscan country, the magnificently poised
city, the sinister black-cowled confraternité that was winding down
the hill, each member carrying a lighted torch—between all this and
the cemetery itself where, among the wreaths of artificial flowers,
there was stuck up on each grave a cheap photograph of the
deceased in his or her horrible Sunday finery, with a maudlin motto
inscribed upon the frame. In the contrast too in Seville between Holy
Week, the pageantry of which is organised by the parish priests—a
wooden platform, for instance, carried slowly through the streets on
which stands the august Jesùs de la Muerte flanked by two huge
lighted candles—and the Jesuit procession a few days later, in which
Virgins looking like ballerinas and apostles holding guitars go
simpering past all covered with paper flowers. One can get it, too,
from reading the Song of Solomon in the terse Latin of the Vulgate.
It is an art steeped in a noble classical tradition which
nevertheless makes unerringly for what, outside the vast tolerance
of art, would be considered vulgar and hideous—chromo-
lithographs, blood, mad nuns. This classical tradition and this taste
for the tawdry are for ever pulling against each other, and it is just
this conflict that gives it, as art, its peculiar cachet.
This was all very fine; but it would not do for Anna.
“Darling, do you think it matters about a thing being true, as long
as it’s ... and, anyway, what exactly do we mean when we say a
thing is true?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Anna fretfully, “do you believe
that the clergyman turns that bread into Jesus Christ?”
After a second’s hesitation Teresa braced herself and answered,
“Yes.”
“Well, anyway, Daddy doesn’t, I’m sure and,” Anna lowered her
voice, “I’m sure Mummie didn’t either.”
“Well, darling, you know no one is going to force you to believe it
—you can do exactly what you like about it.”
Then Anna trotted off into the garden and Teresa sat on, thinking.
How was she going to cope with Pepa’s children?
These counter-influences—Plasencia and Cambridge—one
continually undoing the work of the other, were so very bad for
them. Childhood was a difficult enough time without that.
She remembered the agony of her own struggle to free herself
from the robe of Nessus, woven by suggestion, heredity, and
imperfectly functioning faculties; was she yet free from the robe?
Anyhow, it was better now than in that awful world of childhood—a
world, as it were, at the bottom of the sea: airless, muted, pervaded
by a dim blue light through which her eyes strained in vain to see
the seaweeds and shells and skulls in their true shape and colour; a
world to which noises from the bright windy land above would from
time to time come floating down, muffled and indistinct—voices of
newspaper boys shouting “Death of Mr. Gladstone! Death of Mr.
Gladstone!” Snatches of tunes from San Toy; bells ringing for the
relief of Mafeking.
 2
September turned into October; the apples grew redder and the
fields—the corn and barley gradually being carted away to be
stacked in barns—grew plainer, severe expanses of a uniform buff
colour, suggesting to Teresa the background of a portrait by
Velasquez.
The children were going back to Cambridge; and their excitement
at the prospect might have convinced the Doña, had she been open
to conviction, that their life there was not an unhappy one.
They were sorry to leave the Doña and Teresa and ’Snice and the
garden—that went without saying; but the prospect of a railway
journey was sufficient to put Jasper, who never looked very far
ahead, into a state of the wildest excitement, and the occasional nip
in the air during the past week had given Anna an appetite for the
almost forgotten joys of lessons, Girl-Guides, the “committee”
organised by a very grand friend of twelve for collecting money for
the Save the Children Fund (one was dubbed a member of the
committee with the President’s tennis-racket and then took terrible
oaths of secrecy), and soon Christmas drawing near, when Nanny
would take them down to brilliantly lighted Boots, with its pleasant
smell of leather and violet powder, to choose their Christmas cards.
Teresa knew what she was feeling; it was a pleasant thought, all
the small creatures hurrying eagerly back from sea or hills or valleys
all over the kingdom—tiny Esquimaux swarming back from their
isolated summer fisheries to the civic life of winter with its endless
small activities, so ridiculous to the outside world, so solemn, and so
terribly important, to themselves.

Shortly after they had reached Cambridge Teresa got the following
letter from Harry Sinclair:
 “Dear Teresa,—Since his return from Plasencia Jasper
has been demanding a cake that turns into a man.
“At first I supposed I had told him about those
gingerbread dragoons that old Positivist Jackson used
to bring us when we were children at Hastings.
“I was mistaken.
“I discover from Anna what he wanted was ‘the true,
real, and substantial presence of the Body of our Lord
Jesus Christ, together with His Soul and Divinity, in the
most holy sacrament of the Eucharist.’
“Now, look here, Teresa, I won’t stand it. If I notice
any further morbid cravings in Jasper for water, bread,
wine, or oil, I shall stop his visits to Plasencia.
“It really is insufferable—and you know quite well
that Pepa would have objected as much as I do.
“Yrs.
“H. J. S.”

It only made Teresa laugh; she knew how Harry must have
enjoyed writing it—could see him jumping on to his bicycle and
hurrying down to the University Library to verify in one of the books
of the late Lord Acton the definition of Transubstantiation.
Unfortunately she left it lying about; and it fell into the hands of
the Doña, whom Teresa found in the act of reading it, with set face
and compressed lips.
At the bottom of her heart the Doña attached as little importance
to it as Teresa had done: the fact of its having been written to
Teresa and not to herself marked it as being nothing more than a
harmless and half facetious means of relieving his feelings; besides,
she knew that to sever all connection with Plasencia would be too
drastic a step—involving too many complications, too many painful
scenes—also, too dramatic a step to be taken by Harry in cold blood.
 But there are very few people who have the strength and poise of
intellect to resist, by an honest scrutiny of facts, the exquisite
pleasure of thinking themselves despitefully used by their enemy—
very few too who can resist the pleasure of avenging this despiteful
usage on a third and, to the vulgar eye, quite innocent person.
The human soul requires for the play that is its hidden life but a
tiny cast; and to provide parts for its enormous company it falls back
upon the device of understudies, six or seven sometimes to one
part. When this is properly understood the use of the scapegoat will
seem less unjust.
Anyhow, the Doña chose to pretend to herself that she took
Harry’s letter seriously; and Dick was chosen as the scapegoat.
There is prevalent in Spain a system of barter with the Deity, the
contracts entered into being of the following nature: If God (or the
Virgin or Saint ...) will make Fulano faithful to Fulana, Fulana will not
enter a theatre for a month; or if God will bring little Juanito safely
through his operation for adenoids, Fulano will try to love his
mother-in-law.
As a result of Harry’s letter the Doña entered into such a contract:
her Maker was to ensure the ultimate saving of her grandchildren’s
souls; while her part of the bargain affected Dick and, incidentally,
was extremely agreeable to herself.
In her bedroom an identical little comedy was enacted on two
separate nights. On its being repeated a third time, Dick burst out
angrily: “Oh, very well then ... it’s a bit ... no one could say I
bothered you much nowadays.... I know—that damned priest has
had the impertinence to interfere in my affairs.... I suppose ... I
won’t ... very well, then!”
If it had not been dark he would have seen that the Doña’s eyes
were bright and shining with pleasure.
For hours he lay awake; a hotch-potch of old grievances boiling
and seething in his mind.
 Always him, always him, giving in every time: that summer years
ago when he had given up golf and Harlech to take them all to Cadiz
instead—very few men would have done that! And if they were
going to a play always letting one of the children choose what it was
to be—and jolly little gratitude he got for it all! Jolly little! Snubbed
here, ignored there ... glimpses he had had of other homes came
into his head: “hush, dear, don’t worry father”; “now then, Smith,
hurry! hurry! The master must not be kept waiting”; “all right, dear,
all right, there’s plenty of time.... Gladys dear, just run and fetch
your father’s pipe.... Now, Charlie, where’s father’s overcoat? Good-
bye darling, I’ll go to the Stores myself this morning and see about it
for you ... good-bye, dear, don’t tire yourself ...” whereas here it
was: “Well, Dick; I really don’t see how you can have the car this
morning—Arnold wants it and he’s so seldom here....” Arnold!
Arnold! Arnold! Oh what endless injustice that name conjured up!
Actually it was years since they had had Welsh rarebit as a savoury
because Arnold had once said the smell made him feel sick ... and
oh, the cruelty and injustice on that birthday when the Doña with an
indulgent smile had asked him what he would like for dinner (damn
her impertinence—as if it wasn’t his own house and his own food
and his own money!), and he had chosen ox-tail soup, sole,
partridge, roly-poly and marrow-bones—ox-tail soup had been
“scrapped” because Arnold didn’t like it, sole because they’d had it
the night before, roly-poly because Arnold said it wasn’t a dinner-
sweet. As to the marrow-bones—they had not been “scrapped,”
indeed, but as every one knows, a dish of marrow-bones is a lottery,
and he, Dick, the Birthday King, had drawn a blank—a hollow
mockery, in which a tiny Gulliver might have sat dry and safe, not a
single drop of grease falling on his wig or his broadcloth. But
Arnold’s had been a lordly bone, dropping at first without persuasion
two or three great blobs of semi-coagulated amber, and then
yielding to his proddings the coyer treasures of its chinks and
crannies, what time he had cried triumphantly, “More toast, please,
Rendall!” And the Doña had watched him with a touched and
gratified smile, as if she were witnessing for the first time the
incidence of merit and its deserts. And it was not merely that the