"Whereas if we're Mr. and Miss Basingstoke at our hotels, and Mr. and Mrs. at the post-office, it's all as simple as the Hebrew alphabet."
"Well, it's not quite as simple as A B C, but very nearly. So that's settled."
"What," he asked, hastily, anxious to show his sense of a difficulty avoided, a subject dismissed--"what do you think about when you look out of the windows in trains? Or don't you think at all--just let the country flow through your soul as though it were music?"
"One does that when one's _in_ it," she answered, "in woods and meadows and in those deep lanes where you see nothing but the hedges and the cart-tracks--and on the downs--yes. But when you look out at the country it's different, isn't it? One looks at the churches and thinks about all the people who were christened and married and buried there, and then you look at the houses they lived in--the old farm-houses more than anything. Do you know, all my life I've wished I'd been born a farmer's daughter. All the little things of life in those thatched homesteads are beautiful to me. The smell of the wood smoke, and the way all your life is next door to out-of-doors--always having to go out and feed the calves or the pigs or the fowls, and always little young things, the goslings and the ducklings and the chicks--you know how soft and pretty they are. And all these lovely little live things dependent on you. And the men as well--they come home tired from their work and you have their meals all ready--the bread you've baked yourself, and the pasties you've made--perhaps, even, you brew the beer and salt the pork--and they come in, your husband and your father and your brothers, and they think what a good housekeeper you are, and love you for it. Or if you're a man yourself, all your work's out of doors with the nice, clean earth and making things grow, and seeing the glorious seasons go round and round like a splendid kaleidoscope; and in the winter coming home through the dusk and seeing the dancing light of your own hearth-fire showing through the windows, till you go into the warm, cozy place, and then the red curtains are drawn and the door is shut, and you're safe inside--at home."
He felt in every word a new intimacy, a new confidence. For the first time she was speaking to him from the heart without afterthought and without reservations. And he knew why. He knew that the queen, confident and confiding, spoke to the faithful knight. And the matter of her speech no less than its manner enchanted him so that he could think of nothing better to say than: