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Page 32
Philip himself, as a boy, had been keenly conscious of
these defects. Sometimes when he had been bullied or
hustled about at school he would retire to his cubicle and
examine his features in a looking-glass, and he would sigh
and say, "It is a weak face. I shall never carve a place
for myself in the world." But as years went on he became
either less self-conscious or more self-satisfied. The
world, he found, made a niche for him as it did for every
one. Decision of character might come later--or he might
have it without knowing. At all events he had got a sense
of beauty and a sense of humour, two most desirable gifts.
The sense of beauty developed first. It caused him at the
age of twenty to wear parti-coloured ties and a squashy hat,
to be late for dinner on account of the sunset, and to catch
art from Burne-Jones to Praxiteles. At twenty-two he went
to Italy with some cousins, and there he absorbed into one
aesthetic whole olive-trees, blue sky, frescoes, country
inns, saints, peasants, mosaics, statues, beggars. He came
back with the air of a prophet who would either remodel
Sawston or reject it. All the energies and enthusiasms of a
rather friendless life had passed into the championship of beauty.
In a short time it was over. Nothing had happened
either in Sawston or within himself. He had shocked
half-a-dozen people, squabbled with his sister, and bickered
with his mother. He concluded that nothing could happen,
not knowing that human love and love of truth sometimes
conquer where love of beauty fails.
A little disenchanted, a little tired, but aesthetically
intact, he resumed his placid life, relying more and more on
his second gift, the gift of humour. If he could not reform
the world, he could at all events laugh at it, thus
attaining at least an intellectual superiority. Laughter,
he read and believed, was a sign of good moral health, and
he laughed on contentedly, till Lilia's marriage toppled
contentment down for ever. Italy, the land of beauty, was
ruined for him. She had no power to change men and things
who dwelt in her. She, too, could produce avarice,
brutality, stupidity--and, what was worse, vulgarity. It was
on her soil and through her influence that a silly woman had
married a cad. He hated Gino, the betrayer of his life's
ideal, and now that the sordid tragedy had come, it filled
him with pangs, not of sympathy, but of final disillusion.
The disillusion was convenient for Mrs. Herriton, who
saw a trying little period ahead of her, and was glad to
have her family united.
"Are we to go into mourning, do you think?" She always
asked her children's advice where possible.
Harriet thought that they should. She had been
detestable to Lilia while she lived, but she always felt
that the dead deserve attention and sympathy. "After all
she has suffered. That letter kept me awake for nights.
The whole thing is like one of those horrible modern plays
where no one is in 'the right.' But if we have mourning, it
will mean telling Irma."
"Of course we must tell Irma!" said Philip.
"Of course," said his mother. "But I think we can still
not tell her about Lilia's marriage."
"I don't think that. And she must have suspected
something by now."
"So one would have supposed. But she never cared for
her mother, and little girls of nine don't reason clearly.
She looks on it as a long visit. And it is important, most
important, that she should not receive a shock. All a
child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents.
Destroy that and everything goes--morals, behaviour,
everything. Absolute trust in some one else is the essence
of education. That is why I have been so careful about
talking of poor Lilia before her."
"But you forget this wretched baby. Waters and Adamson
write that there is a baby."
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