Ralph shook his head, and she sighed.
‘Ah, no; it must have been pulled down by this time, with all the other old houses. There were such pretty lanes in those days. That was how your uncle met your Aunt Emily, you know,’ she addressed Katharine. ‘They walked home through the lanes.’
A sprig of May in her bonnet,’ Mrs Cosham ejaculated, reminiscently.
And next Sunday he had violets in his buttonhole. And that was how we guessed.’
Katharine laughed. She looked at Ralph. His eyes were meditative, and she wondered what he found in this old gossip to make him ponder so contentedly. She felt, she hardly knew why, a curious pity for him.
‘Uncle John—yes, “poor John,” you always called him. Why was that?’ she asked, to make them go on talking, which, indeed, they needed little invitation to do.
‘That was what his father, old Sir Richard, always called him. Poor John, or the fool of the family,’ Mrs Milvain hastened to inform them. ‘The other boys were so brilliant, and he could never pass his examinations, so they sent him to India—a long voyage in those days, poor fellow. You had your own room, you know, and you did it up. But he will get his knighthood and a pension, I believe,’ she said, turning to Ralph, ‘only it is not England.’
‘No,’ Mrs Cosham confirmed her, ‘it is not England. In those days we thought an Indian Judgeship about equal to a county-court judgeship at home. His Honour—a pretty title, but still, not the top of the tree. However,’ she sighed, ‘if you have a wife and seven children, and people nowadays very quickly forget your father’s name—well, you have to take what you can get,’ she concluded.
‘And I fancy,’ Mrs Milvain resumed, lowering her voice rather confidentially, ‘that John would have done more if it hadn’t been for his wife, your Aunt Emily. She was a very good woman, devoted to him, of course, but she was not ambitious for him, and if a wife isn’t ambitious for her husband, especially in a profession like the law, clients soon get to know of it. In our young days, Mr Denham, we used to say that we knew which of our friends would become judges, by looking at the girls they married. And so it was, and so, I fancy, it always will be. I don’t think,’ she added, summing up these scattered remarks, ‘that any man is really happy unless he succeeds in his profession.’
Mrs Cosham approved of this sentiment with more ponderous sagacity from her side of the tea-table, in the first place by swaying her head, and in the second by remarking:
‘No, men are not the same as women. I fancy Alfred Tennyson spoke the truth about that as about many other things. How I wish he’d lived to write “The Prince”—a sequel to “The Princess”!2 I confess I’m almost tired of Princesses. We want some one to show us what a good man can be. We have Laura and Beatrice, Antigone and Cordelia,3 but we have no heroic man. How do you, as a poet, account for that, Mr Denham?’
‘I’m not a poet,’ said Ralph good-humouredly. ‘I’m only a solicitor.’
‘But you write too?’ Mrs Cosham demanded, afraid lest she should be baulked of her priceless discovery, a young man truly devoted to literature.
‘In my spare time,’ Denham reassured her.
‘In your spare time!’ Mrs Cosham echoed. ‘That is a proof of devotion, indeed.’ She half closed her eyes, and indulged herself in a fascinating picture of a briefless barrister lodged in a garret, writing immortal novels by the light of a farthing dip.be But the romance which fell upon the figures of great writers and illumined their pages was no false radiance in her case. She carried her pocket Shakespeare about with her, and met life fortified by the words of the poets. How far she saw Denham, and how far she confused him with some hero of fiction, it would be hard to say. Literature had taken possession even of her memories. She was matching him, presumably, with certain characters in the old novels, for she came out after a pause, with:
‘Um—um—Pendennis—Warrington—I could never forgive Laura,’ she pronounced energetically, ‘for not marrying George, in spite of everything. George Eliot did the very same thing;4 and Lewes was a little frog- faced man, with the manner of a dancing master. But Warrington, now, had everything in his favour; intellect, passion, romance, distinction, and the connexion was a mere piece of undergraduate folly. Arthur, I confess, has always seemed to me a bit of a fop; I can’t imagine how Laura married him. But you say you’re a solicitor, Mr Denham. Now there are one or two things I should like to ask you—about Shakespeare—’ She drew out her small, worn volume with some difficulty, opened it, and shook it in the air. ‘They say, nowadays, that Shakespeare was a lawyer. They say that accounts for his knowledge of human nature. There’s a fine example for you, Mr Denham. Study your clients, young man, and the world will be the richer one of these days, I have no doubt. Tell me, how do we come out of it, now; better or worse than you expected?’
Thus called upon to sum up the worth of human nature in a few words, Ralph answered unhesitatingly:
‘Worse, Mrs Cosham, a good deal worse. I’m afraid the ordinary man is a bit of a rascal—’
‘And the ordinary woman?’
‘No, I don’t like the ordinary woman either—’
‘Ah, dear me, I’ve no doubt that’s very true, very true.’ Mrs Cosham sighed. ‘Swiftbf would have agreed with you, anyhow—’ She looked at him, and thought that there were signs of distinct power in his brow. He would do well, she thought, to devote himself to satire.
‘Charles Lavington, you remember, was a solicitor,’ Mrs Milvain interposed, rather resenting the waste of time involved in talking about fictitious people when you might be talking about real people. ‘But you wouldn’t remember him, Katharine.’
‘Mr Lavington? Oh yes, I do,’ said Katharine, waking from other thoughts with her little start. ‘The summer we had a house near Tenby.bg I remember the field and the pond with the tadpoles, and making hay- stacks with Mr Lavington.’
‘She is right. There
‘And I remember the dog chained up in the yard, and the dead snakes hanging in the toolhouse.’
‘It was at Tenby that you were chased by the bull,’ Mrs Milvain continued. ‘But that you couldn’t remember, though it’s true you were a wonderful child. Such eyes she had, Mr Denham! I used to say to her father, “She’s watching us, and summing us all up in her little mind.” And they had a nurse in those days,’ she went on, telling her story with charming solemnity to Ralph, ‘who was a good woman, but engaged to a sailor. When she ought to have been attending to her baby, her eyes were on the sea. And Mrs Hilbery allowed this girl—Susan her name was—to
