It was on the old and unchanged ideas that I wanted to dwell. The new would bring me back all too quickly to ancestral portraits, to imposing fireplaces and costly bear-skin rugs. I assented readily to her self-evident proposition and brushed it aside for the most interesting matter of Joseph Hicks.
"You used to love to drive," I said. "I can see you now wheedling Joe into letting you have the reins. Don't you remember his telling you that no self-respecting woman was ever seen driving more than one horse?"
"How shocked he would be could he see how I handle four," she said.
Should we never get out of the shadow of costly things, out of the clutch of changed ideas? For a moment I had a picture of Penelope on the box of a coach, ribbons and whip in hand, with four smart cobs stepping to the music of jingling harness, with bandy-legged grooms on the boot, and beside her some perfectly tailored creature in a glistening top-hat. It was a gallant picture, and one in which there was no part for me. Metaphorically I hurled at it a missile of the common clay of which, after all, we were both made. Surely fishing was a subject on which her ideas could not change.
"Do you remember the great expeditions we used to have along the creek?" I said.
"Remember them? Why, David, I never could forget such days as those." She leaned forward, with her hands clasped in her lap, as though to bring herself into closer touch with the kindred spirit on the divan. "I often laugh over the time I caught the big turtle on my hook. You remember--we were on the bridge at the end of the meadow, and I thought I had captured a whale, and when I saw it I was so astonished that I went head-first into the water."
"And I dived after you," I cried excitedly, "into two feet of water and three feet of mud."
"And we both ran home soaking wet and covered with green slime," she went on rapidly. "Will you ever forget her look when mother----"
"Mother?" There was in my exclamation a note of surprise in which was almost lost the delight I felt in her use of that word.
She caught the surprise alone, and spoke now as though offended at what she thought my protest. "Yes, mother. Why, David, don't you remember I always called her mother? And she was the only mother I ever knew--even if only for a brief summer."