He took
the letters out of her hand, and protested:
"Of course they're absurd, Rachel; of course they say things just
because other people say them, but even so, what a nice woman Miss Allan
is; you can't deny that; and Mrs. Thornbury too; she's got too many
children I grant you, but if half-a-dozen of them had gone to the bad
instead of rising infallibly to the tops of their trees--hasn't she a
kind of beauty--of elemental simplicity as Flushing would say? Isn't
she rather like a large old tree murmuring in the moonlight, or a river
going on and on and on? By the way, Ralph's been made governor of the
Carroway Islands--the youngest governor in the service; very good, isn't
it?"
But Rachel was at present unable to conceive that the vast majority of
the affairs of the world went on unconnected by a single thread with her
own destiny.
"I won't have eleven children," she asserted; "I won't have the eyes of
an old woman. She looks at one up and down, up and down, as if one were
a horse."
"We must have a son and we must have a daughter," said Terence, putting
down the letters, "because, let alone the inestimable advantage of being
our children, they'd be so well brought up." They went on to sketch an
outline of the ideal education--how their daughter should be required
from infancy to gaze at a large square of cardboard painted blue, to
suggest thoughts of infinity, for women were grown too practical;
and their son--he should be taught to laugh at great men, that is, at
distinguished successful men, at men who wore ribands and rose to the
tops of their trees.
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