“You make things very complicated,” she said, after a silence.
Gumbril spread out his great-coat on a green bank and they sat down. Leaning back, his hands under his head, he watched her sitting there beside him. She had taken off her hat; there was a stir of wind in those childish curls, and at the nape, at the temples, where the hair had sleaved out thin and fine, the sunlight made little misty haloes of gold. Her hands clasped round her knees, she sat quite still, looking out across the green expanses, at the trees, at the white clouds on the horizon. There was quiet in her mind, he thought. She was native to that crystal world; for her, the steps came comfortingly through the silence and the lovely thing brought with it no terrors. It was all so easy for her and simple.
Ah, so simple, so simple; like the Hire Purchase System on which Rosie had bought her pink bed. And how simple it was, too, to puddle clear waters and unpetal every flower!—every wild flower, by God! one ever passed in a governess cart at the heels of a barrel-bellied pony. How simple to spit on the floors of churches! _Si prega di non sputare._ Simple to kick one’s legs and enjoy oneself—dutifully—in pink underclothing. Perfectly simple.
“It’s like the Arietta, don’t you think?” said Emily suddenly, “the Arietta of Op. 111.” And she hummed the first bars of the air. “Don’t you feel it’s like that?”
“Everything,” said Emily. “To-day, I mean. You and me. These gardens——” And she went on humming.
Gumbril shook his head. “Too simple for me,” he said.
Emily laughed. “Ah, but then think how impossible it gets a little farther on.” She agitated her fingers wildly, as though she were trying to play the impossible passages. “It begins easily for the sake of poor imbeciles like me; but it goes on, it goes on, more and more fully and subtly and abstrusely and embracingly. But it’s still the same movement.”
The shadows stretched farther and farther across the lawns, and as the sun declined the level light picked out among the grasses innumerable stipplings of shadow; and in the paths, that had seemed under the more perpendicular rays as level as a table, a thousand little shadowy depressions and sun-touched mountains were now apparent. Gumbril looked at his watch.