The Three Sisters Part 21

"Because you don't say those things. It isn't polite."

"But I know Alice doesn't play well--not those big things. The wonder is she can play them at all."

"Why does she attempt--the big things?"

"Why does anybody? Because she loves them. She's never heard them properly played. So she doesn't know. She just trusts to her feeling."

"Is there anything else, after all, you _can_ trust?"

"I don't know. You see, Alice's feeling tells her it's all right to play like that, and _my_ feeling tells me it's all wrong."

"You can trust _your_ feelings."

"Why mine more than hers?"

"Because _your_ feelings are the feelings of a beautifully sane and perfectly balanced person."

"How can you possibly tell? You don't know me."

"I know your type."

"My type isn't me. You can't tell by that."

"You can if you're a physiologist."

"Being a physiologist won't tell you anything about _me_."

"Oh, won't it?"

"It can't."

"Why not?"

"How can it?"

"You think it can't tell me anything about your soul?"

"Oh--my soul----" Her shoulders expressed disdain for it.

"Do you dislike my mentioning it? Would you rather we didn't talk about it? Perhaps you're tired of having it talked about?"

"No; my poor soul has never done anything to get itself talked about."

"I only thought that as your father, perhaps, specialises in souls--"

"He doesn't specialise in mine. He knows nothing about it."

"The specialist never does. To know anything--the least little thing--about the soul, you must know everything--everything you _can_ know--about the body. So that you're wrong even about your soul. Being a physiologist tells me that your sort of body--a transparently clean and strong and utterly unconscious body--goes with a transparently clean and strong and utterly unconscious soul."

"Utterly unconscious?"

He was silent a moment and then answered:

"Utterly unconscious."

They walked on in silence till they came in sight of the marshes and the long gray line of Upthorne Farm.

"That's where I met you once," he said. "Do you remember? You were coming out of the door as I went in."

"You seem to have been always meeting me."

"Always meeting you. And then---always missing you. Just when I expected most to find you."

"If we go much farther in this direction," said Gwenda, "we shall meet Papa."

"Well--I suppose some day I shall have to meet him. Do you realise that I've never met him yet?"

"Haven't you?"

"No. Always I've been on the point of meeting him, and always some malignant fate has interfered."

She smiled. He loved her smile.

"Why are you smiling?"

"I was only wondering whether the fate was really so malignant."

"You mean that if he met me he'd dislike me?"

"He always _has_ disliked anybody we like. You see, he's a very funny father."

"All fathers," said Rowcliffe, "are more or less funny."

She laughed. Her laughter enchanted him.

"Yes. But _my_ father doesn't mean to be as funny as he is."

"I see. He wouldn't really mean to dislike me. Then, perhaps, if I regularly laid myself out for it, by years of tender and untiring devotion I might win him over?"

She laughed again; she laughed as youth laughs, for the pure joy of laughter. She looked on her father as a persistent, delightful jest.

He adored her laughter.

It proved how strong and sane she was--if she could take him like that. Rowcliffe had seen women made bitter, made morbid, driven into lunatic asylums by fathers who were as funny as Mr. Cartaret.

"You wouldn't, you wouldn't," she said. "He's funnier than you've any idea of."

"Is he ever ill?"

"Never."