“So well aware was I that I perpetrated the joke which you have spoiled by threshing it. Why are you not at church, Mr. Saltren, listening for the rector’s pronunciation of the Greek names of St. Paul’s acquaintances, in the hopes of detecting a false quantity among them?”
“Because Giles has a cold, and I stay at my lady’s desire to read the psalms and lessons to him.”
“I wonder whether schooling Giles is as intolerable as taking Sunday class; if it be, you have my grateful sympathy.”
“Your sympathy, Miss Inglett, will relieve me of many a tribulus which adheres to my robe.”
“Is Giles a stupid boy and troublesome pupil?”
“Not at all. My troubles are not connected with my little pupil.”
“Class-taking in that Sunday-school is a sort of mental garrotting,” said Arminell. “I wonder whether a teacher always feels as if his brains were being measured for a hat when he is giving instruction.”
“Only when there is non-receptivity in the minds of those he teaches, or tries to teach. May I ask if you are not going to church, Miss Inglett?”
“I have done the civil by attending the Sunday-school, and the articles disapprove of works of supererogation. I am going to worship under the fresh green leaves, and to listen to the choir of the birds—blackbird, thrush, and ouzel. I am too ruffled in temper to sit still in church and listen to the same common-places in the same see-saw voice from the pulpit. Do you know what it is to be restless, Mr. Saltren, and not know what makes you ill at ease? To desire greatly something, and not know what you long after?”
The young man was walking beside her, a little in the rear, respectfully, not full abreast. He was a pale man with an oval face, dark eyes and long dark lashes, and a slight downy moustache.
“I can in no way conceive that anything can be lacking to Miss Inglett,” he said. “She has everything to make life happy, an ideally perfect lot, absolutely deficient in every element that can jar with and disturb tranquillity and happiness.”
“You judge only by exterior circumstances. You might say the same of the bird in the egg—it fits it as a glove, it is walled round by a shell against danger, it is warmed by the breast of the parent, why should it be impatient of its coiled up, comatose condition? Simply because that condition is coiled up and comatose. Why should the young sponge ever detach itself from the rock on which it first developed by the side of the great absorbent old sponge? It gets enough to eat, it is securely attached by its foot to the rock; it is in the oceanic level that suits its existence. Why should it let go all at once and float away, rise to the surface and cling elsewhere? Because of the monotony of its life of absorption and contraction, and of its sedentary habits. But, there,—enough about myself; I did not intend to speak of myself. You have brambles clinging to you. Show me them, that I may put my foot on them and free you.”