“Well,” he said as he rejoined her after very carefully closing the gate. “What I really wanted was an opportunity of just mentioning something that happens to be of interest to you—if it does happen to interest you. … I suppose I’d better put the thing as simply as possible. … Practically. … I’m just right over the head and all in love with you. … I thought I’d like to tell you. …”
Immense silences.
“Of course I won’t pretend there haven’t been others,” Mr. Direck suddenly resumed. “There have. One particularly. But I can assure you I’ve never felt the depth and height or anything like the sort of Quiet Clear Conviction. … And now I’m just telling you these things, Miss Corner, I don’t know whether it will interest you if I tell you that you’re really and truly the very first love I ever had as well as my last. I’ve had sent over—I got it only yesterday—this lil’ photograph of a miniature portrait of one of my ancestor’s relations—a Corner just as you are. It’s here. …”
He had considerable difficulties with his pockets and papers. Cecily, mute and flushed and inconvenienced by a preposterous and unaccountable impulse to weep, took the picture he handed her.
“When I was a lil’ fellow of fifteen,” said Mr. Direck in the tone of one producing a melancholy but conclusive piece of evidence, “I worshipped that miniature. It seemed to me—the loveliest person. … And—it’s just you. …”
He too was preposterously moved.
It seemed a long time before Cecily had anything to say, and then what she had to say she said in a softened, indistinct voice. “You’re very kind,” she said, and kept hold of the little photograph.
They had halted for the photograph. Now they walked on again.
“I thought I’d like to tell you,” said Mr. Direck and became tremendously silent.
Cecily found him incredibly difficult to answer. She tried to make herself light and offhand, and to be very frank with him.
“Of course,” she said, “I knew—I felt somehow—you meant to say something of this sort to me—when you asked me to come with you—”
“Well?” he said.
“And I’ve been trying to make my poor brain think of something to say to you.”
She paused and contemplated her difficulties. …
“Couldn’t you perhaps say something of the same kind—such as I’ve been trying to say?” said Mr. Direck presently, with a note of earnest helpfulness. “I’d be very glad if you could.”
“Not exactly,” said Cecily, more careful than ever.
“Meaning?”
“I think you know that you are the best of friends. I think you are, oh—a Perfect Dear.”
“Well—that’s all right—so far.”
“That is as far.”
“You don’t know whether you love me? That’s what you mean to say.”
“No. … I feel somehow it isn’t that. … Yet. …”
“There’s nobody else by any chance?”
“No.” Cecily weighed things. “You needn’t trouble about that.”
“Only … only you don’t know.”
Cecily made a movement of assent.
“It’s no good pretending I haven’t thought about you,” she said.
“Well, anyhow I’ve done my best to give you the idea,” said Mr. Direck. “I seem now to have been doing that pretty nearly all the time.”
“Only what should we do?”
Mr. Direck felt this question was singularly artless. “Why!—we’d marry,” he said. “And all that sort of thing.”
“Letty has married—and all that sort of thing,” said Cecily, fixing her eye on him very firmly because she was colouring brightly. “And it doesn’t leave Letty very much—forrader.”
“Well now, they have a good time, don’t they? I’d have thought they have a lovely time!”
“They’ve had a lovely time. And Teddy is the dearest husband. And they have a sweet little house and a most amusing baby. And they play hockey every Sunday. And Teddy does his work. And every week is like every other week. It is just heavenly. Just always the same heavenly. Every Sunday there is a fresh week of heavenly beginning. And this, you see, isn’t heaven; it is earth. And they don’t know it but they are getting bored. I have been watching them, and they are getting dreadfully bored. It’s heartbreaking to watch, because they are almost my dearest people. Teddy used to be making perpetual jokes about the house and the baby and his work and Letty, and now—he’s made all the possible jokes. It’s only now and then he gets a fresh one. It’s like spring flowers and then—summer. And Letty sits about and doesn’t sing. They want something new to happen. … And there’s Mr. and Mrs. Britling. They love each other. Much more than Mrs. Britling dreams, or Mr. Britling for the matter of that. Once upon a time things were heavenly for them too, I suppose. Until suddenly it began to happen to them that nothing new ever happened. …”
“Well,” said Mr. Direck, “people can travel.”
“But that isn’t real happening,” said Cecily.
“It keeps one interested.”
“But real happening is doing something.”
“You come back to that,” said Mr. Direck. “I never met anyone before who’d quite got that spirit as you have it. I wouldn’t alter it. It’s part of you. It’s part of this place. It’s what Mr. Britling always seems to be saying and never quite knowing he’s said it. It’s just as though all the things that are going on weren’t the things that ought to be going on—but something else quite different. Somehow one falls into it. It’s as if your daily life didn’t matter, as if politics didn’t matter, as if the King and the social round and business and all those things weren’t anything really, and as though you felt there was something else—out of sight—round the corner—that you ought to be getting at. Well, I admit, that’s got hold of
