“But you do prefer a long one, darling,” said Emily. “I always like that side of you. And now I know it is the simplicity of greatness. But don’t make the book any longer. It is so careless of popular opinion to leave it short.”
“I wish … I wonder why we give voice to these wishes; but I wish old Crabbe had lived to see you with a book written, Herrick,” said Masson. “He always said that you were a man who would write, if you put yourself to it.”
“Just what Nicholas has been saying of him,” said Emily. “How beautiful they both are!”
“I have been a long fool, idle through seventy years of a good life,” said Herrick. “But I don’t know that I can wish that about Crabbe. I feel as if I should not have written this book, apart from his death; as if it would not have shaped itself in my mind as I now feel it. Of course there is no connection. None at all. None. But it came to me, as I sat there, the whole thing, the whole book. There it was. I can’t explain it.”
“It doesn’t seem good management,” said Emily. “To keep your book to yourself for seventy years, and then have Mr. Crabbe die to make it come out. But you are not a good manager; and Mr. Merry can’t do more than most of our life for both of us, and my death. And Mr. Crabbe was ninety, and you had it all so nice for him.”
“How long will it take you actually to write it, Herrick?” said Bumpus.
“I have it this time,” said Herrick. “I have been letting it grow in my head. Because of course in a way it has been there for some time. It is as good as written down. It was the form of it that flashed on me. I do things much in my head, as you know.”
“Oh, Nicholas, I didn’t know. I do admire you,” said Emily.
“I think I have found myself at last,” said Herrick. “I think that, God willing, I shall have done my little bit for my generation, done what every man ought to do, before he dies.”
“You don’t really think it is what every man ought to do,” said Emily. “I do hope it isn’t.”
“Assuming God, you wouldn’t do much if he wasn’t willing,” said Masson.
Bumpus laughed, and looked almost proudly at Masson.
“Are we going to be broad and wicked?” said Emily. “I like that, because I am not very educated, and so still young in my mind. Really, it would be nice to have some religion, and not go on without ever any comfort. And I am not like Nicholas, who is really God’s equal, and not his child at all. I think it is better not to have God than to be like that with him.”
“It is rather empty for him not to be had,” said Bumpus. “He always seems to me a pathetic figure, friendless and childless and set up alone in a miserable way.”
“Yes, he has a touch of William in him,” said Emily. “But you know he isn’t childless. We give even our boys more advantages than that. Mrs. Merry gives it to them.”
“You can have him childless in these days,” said Bumpus. “But if you have him, I like him really. I like him not childless, and grasping and fond of praise. I like the human and family interest.”
“Yes, he tends to be neutral nowadays,” said Masson. “Perhaps I do resemble him in that.”
“And he had such a personality,” said Emily. “Such a superior, vindictive and overindulgent one. He is one of the best drawn characters in fiction.”
“I really cannot listen to this,” said Herrick.
“Isn’t it quietly conscientious of Herrick, to be behind the parents’ backs what he is to their faces?” said Bumpus. “What he would be to their faces if he saw them.”
“I am deeply grateful to Merry,” said Herrick. “Nobody knows what seeing them is.”
“Mr. Merry does,” said Emily. “I am not grateful to him. I am cringing under a load of obligation. And he is a tragic figure, and haunts me. Now to Mrs. Merry I am just healthily grateful. And to Miss Basden my gratitude is quite of a brisk, employing kind. I almost feel more kindly to Mr. Burgess, who has to have the opposite of gratitude, though I never quite know why. Now I must go and ask Mrs. Merry if we may ask you to stay to dinner. I always think Nicholas and I carry that off so well, having to ask permission to have guests.”
“How Emily runs on and on, doesn’t she?” said Herrick. “Day after day, year after year, the stream never runs dry.”
“It doesn’t seem that it could,” said Masson; “that Emily could ever be subject to age.”
“I always wonder if she had any youth,” said Bumpus, his eyes sweeping over Masson. “She seems somehow ageless, to have nothing to do with age.”
“You knew her when she was young,” said Herrick. “But you were young too, then. She was wonderfully like what she is now. No, I think in a sense she had no youth, just as in a way she will have no old age. She is of that type. A rare one.”
“I think the two omissions compensate for each other,” said Masson.
“I do not. I like the whole of experience,” said Bumpus.
“I always wonder,” went on Herrick, in the tone of a man who kept back nothing of his heart, “if I should have been happier or unhappier without her. I am never bound by convention; and the question arises in the case of any intimate relationship, however good. We could all have moulded ourselves differently.”
“We can’t change the stuff in the mould,” said Masson.
“And Emily is a woman with a good deal of the man in her,” said Bumpus.
“Oh, I have had more to do with women than you two have,” said Herrick. “I am not as much off
