England -- Fiction; Honeymoons -- Fiction; Love stories; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; Voyages and travels -- Fiction
"Ah!" she said, "that's my new incarnation. But what the old one loved
goes deeper than that. I love adventure and new bits of the world as I
love strawberries and ice-cream, and waltzing and Chopin, but the little
house in the green country is like the daily bread of the heart."
"I understand you," he said, slowly. "I understand you in the only
possible way. I mean that's the way I feel about it, too. If you were
really my sister, what a united family the last of the Basingstokes
would be."
"Do you really feel the same about it--you, too?" she asked. "Oh, what a
pity I wasn't born Basingstoke, and we would have lived on our own farm
and been happy all our lives."
He would not say what he might have said, and her heart praised him for
not saying it. And so at last they came to Warwick, and Charles had
bounded from the dog-box all pink tongue and white teeth and strenuous
white-covered muscles, and knocked down a little boy in a blue jersey,
who had to be consoled by chocolate which came out of the machine like
the god in the Latin tag. And then all the luggage was retrieved--there
was getting to be a most respectable amount of it, as she pointed
out--and it and they and Charles got into a fly (for there are still
places where an open carriage bears that ironic name) and drove through
the afternoon sunshine to the Warwick Arms. But when they were asked to
write their names in the visitors' book, each naturally signed a
Christian name, and the management, putting two and two together,
deduced Mr. and Mrs. Basingstoke, and entered this result in more
intimate books, living in retirement in the glass case which preserves
the young lady who knows all about which rooms you can have. The
chambermaid and the boots agreed that Mr. and Mrs. Basingstoke were a
handsome couple. Also, when a new-comer, signing his name, asked a
question about the signatures just above his, "Mr. and Mrs.
Basingstoke," was the answer he got.
Now all this time, for all her frankness, she had been concealing
something from him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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