Page:Kangaroo, 1923.pdf/84

 like butter scraped on bread. Don't I remember it! I should think I do."

"Cornwall had a great charm for me."

"Well, I don't know where you found it, I'm sure. But I suppose you've got a way of your own with a place, let it be Cornwall or where it may, to make it look well. It all depends where you're born and where you come from."

"Perhaps," said Harriet.

"I've never seen an Australian cottage looking like this, now. And yet it isn't the number of things you've put into it."

"The number I've taken out," laughed Harriet.

William James sat there with his quiet, slumberous-seeming body, watching her: watching the quick radiance of her fair face, and the charm of her bearing. There was something quick and sure and, as it were, beyond the ordinary clay, about her, that exercised a spell over him. She was his real Cornish idea of a lady: simple, living among people as if one of themselves, and yet not one of themselves: a sort of magic about her. He could almost see a glow in the air around her. And he could see that for her he was just a nice fellow who lived in another world and on another plane than herself, and that he could never come up or she come down. She was the queen that slumbers somewhere in every Cornish imagination, the queen ungrudged. And perhaps, in the true Celtic imagination slumbers the glamorous king as well. The Celt needs the mystic glow of real kingliness. Hence his loneliness in the democratic world of industry, and his social perversity.

"I don't suppose Rose could ever learn to do this with a room, could she now?" he asked, making a slight gesture with his hand. He sat with his clear, queer, light grey eyes fixed on Harriet's face.

""I think so," cried Harriet; then she met the watchful eyes. "In her own way she could. Every woman has her own way, you know."

"Yes, I do know," he answered.

"And you see," said Harriet, "we're more or less lazy people who have no regular work in the world. If we had, perhaps we should live in a different way."

William James shook his head.