Country life -- England -- Fiction; England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Families -- Fiction; Mate selection -- Fiction
He looked at her in some surprise. "Have you found that out already?" he
said. "I found it out after Mother died. I was frightfully unhappy. I
went away by myself to some of the places we'd been to together. But it
made me unhappier still. In fact, it spoilt the memory of those places
for me till I went there again years afterwards, with Cara and B. Then I
got back my first impression of them."
She snuggled up to him. "Take me to them, sometime, Daddy," she said.
"Yes, I will, darling. You were too young then. I think perhaps we
might go this autumn. It was in September that she and I were married.
How happy we were! She had planned out where we were to go to. Mostly
out-of-the-way beautiful places. I suppose I had been too busy amusing
myself, with other people, to want to go to places simply because they
were beautiful, before. But she taught me to love the beauty of Nature,
though for a time after she died it did nothing for me."
"Perhaps it doesn't when you're unhappy and alone. Do you think Caroline
loves it in the same way as Mother did, Daddy?"
He thought for a moment. "She gets it from her, I suppose," he said.
"Perhaps she has it even more strongly. She's going to make it the chief
thing in her life, you know, she and Maurice together. And one doesn't
feel that she is wrong in doing it."
"Of course, she has tried the other," she said, after a pause.
He smiled at her. "Are you thinking that it wouldn't be enough for you?"
he asked. "I don't think it would, darling; it wouldn't have been enough
for Mother and me--a refreshment--perhaps the best sort of refreshment,
while we were young, and something to come to more and more if we had
grown old together. At any rate, you'll have your taste of pleasure, as
Cara and B had it, and you'll be right to enjoy it, as they did. It did
neither of them any harm and it won't do you any harm."
"Why should it do anybody harm, Dad?"
"Oh, well--if pleasure were put in the first place, for the whole of a
lifetime! That's what you see all round you, among people of our sort.
It would have been more of a danger for B than for Caroline. But B is
all right now. She'll make a good loving wife and mother. She'll have a
good time, but she won't put having a good time first."
"I should like you to expound that for me a little, Daddy; for my good,
you know."
"Well, I don't know that I'm the best person to expound it to you,
except perhaps that I've done it a bit too much myself. You see when you
have enough money to do pretty well what you like, you do rather get
into the way of gratifying yourself at every turn--or trying to. Even
the good things in life--love is the best of them all--you're apt to
think more of yourself than of other people--even of the very people you
love."
She thought this might be the beginning of a confidence, and listened
eagerly for more.
"I'm not sure that the best thing for a man isn't to have something
stiff to do," he went on. "I never have had. I've been too lucky."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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