“Darning stockings,” suggested Celia. “I believe that is the real test of feminine virtue. A woman may be allowed to play and sing; she may even speak a couple of modern languages; but her chief merit is supposed to lie in her ability to darn stockings and make a pudding. Now, Mr. Gerard, is not that the old-established idea of perfection in womankind?”
“I believe that the darning and pudding-making are vaguely supposed to include all the domestic virtues. It may seem sordid in a lover to consider such details, but the happiness of a husband depends somewhat upon his wife’s housekeeping. Could any home be Eden in which the cook gave warning once a month, and the policeman eat up all the cold meat?”
Celia laughed, but the laugh ended with a sigh. She had made up her mind that if ever she married her husband must be rich enough to be above the petty struggles of household economy, the cheese parings of a limited income. He must be able to keep at least a pony carriage, and the pony carriage must be perfect in all its appointments. A footman Celia might forego, but she must have the neatest of parlour-maids. She did not aspire to get her gowns from Worth: but she must not be circumscribed as to collars and cuffs, and must be able to employ the best dressmaker in Exeter or Plymouth.
But here was a young man who must wait for years before he could marry; or must drag some poor young woman down into the dismal swamp of genteel poverty, Celia felt honestly sorry for him. Of all the men she had ever met he seemed to her the most manly, the brightest, the bravest—perhaps altogether the best. If not exactly handsome, there was that in his marked features and vivid expression which Celia thought more attractive than absolute regularity of line, or splendour of colour.
Mrs. Clare had been absent all the morning, engaged in small domestic duties which she considered important, but which Celia described sweepingly as “muddling.” She appeared by-and-bye at luncheon—a meal which the Vicar never ate, and entertained her guest with a dissertation on the tiresomeness of servants, and the various difficulties of housekeeping, until Edward—who honoured the family circle with his society while he refreshed his exhausted muse with cold roast beef and pickles—ruthlessly cut short his mother’s sermonising, and entered upon a critical discussion with George Gerard as to the relative merits of Browning and Swinburne.
Celia was surprised to discover how widely the young surgeon had read. She had expected to find him ignorant of almost everything outside his own particular domain.
“How can you find time for light literature?” she asked.
“Light literature is my only relaxation.”
“You go to the theatres now and then, I suppose?”
“I like to go when there is something good to be seen,” answered Gerard, flushing at the recollection of the time when he had gone three nights a week to feast his eyes upon La Chicot’s florid loveliness.
He felt ashamed of an infatuation which at the time had seemed to him as noble as the Greek’s worship of abstract beauty.
By the time luncheon was finished the rain had ceased, and the gray, wintry sky, though sunless, looked no longer threatening.
“Not a bad afternoon for a ramble on yonder moor,” said Gerard, standing in the bay window, looking out at the landscape. “Would you have the courage to be my pioneer, Miss Clare?”
Celia looked at her brother, interrogatively.
“I’m not in the humour for any more scribbling today,” said Edward, “so perhaps a good long walk would be the easiest way of getting rid of the afternoon. Put on your waterproof and clump soles, Celia, and show us the way.”
Celia ran off, delighted at the opportunity. A moorland ramble with a conversable young man was at least a novelty.
In the hall the damsel met her mother, and in a sudden overflow of spirits stopped to give her a filial hug.
“Let us have something nice for dinner, mother dear,” she pleaded. “It’s his last evening.”
The tone of the request inspired Mrs. Clare with vague fears. A girl could hardly have said more had the visitor been her plighted lover.
“What an idea!” she exclaimed, good-humouredly. “Of course I shall do the best I can, but Monday is such an awkward day.”
“Of course, dear. We all know that, but don’t let it be quite a Monday dinner,” urged Celia.
“As for that young man, I don’t believe he knows what he is eating.”
“Heaven forbid that he should be like my father and his dinner the most important event in his day!” retorted Celia, whereat Mrs. Clare murmured mildly—
“My love, your father has a very peculiar constitution. There are things which he can eat, and things which he cannot eat.”
“Of course, you dear deluded mater. Cold mutton is poisonous to his constitution; but I never heard of his being the worse for truffled turkey.”
And then Celia skipped off, to attire herself, not unbecomingly, in a dark gray Ulster, and the most impertinent of billycock hats.
The ramble on the moor was a success. Edward held himself aloof, and smoked his cigar in gloomy silence, but the two others were as merry as a brace of schoolboys taking a stolen holiday. They clambered the steepest paths, crossed the wildest of hill and hollow, narrowly escaped coming to grief in boggy ground, and laughed and talked with inexhaustible spirits all the time. George Gerard hardly knew himself, and was struck with wonder at finding that life could be so pleasant. The wintry air was fresh and clear, the wind whistled gaily over the vast sweep of undulating turf and heather. Just at sunset there came a flood of yellow light over the low western sky; a farewell smile from a sun that had hidden himself all day.
“Good gracious!” cried Celia, “we shall barely have time to scamper home to dinner; and if there is one thing that irritates papa more than another, it is to wait five
