Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/324

 most of the highbrow stuff—so called. It's like good surgery. Besides."

Kit looked at him with those clear and direct eyes of his.

"What?"

"You get at tendencies, social atmospheres, even hints of the latest social perversion or disease. What's brewing in the wild young blood. It's interesting."

"This book interested you?"

"It did. Shockingly honest—you know. Like a precocious child asking awkward questions."

Christopher was rather shocked by "Broken Pottery," and it is probable that the book would have shocked him even more forcibly had he been capable of reacting to its more esoteric meaning. He read about that absurd and somewhat repulsive person "Mr. Gulliver," who concealed a bullying uxoriousness beneath inches of sentimental fat, and whose one and only answer to the rebel woman's outcry was "O, put her to bed and give her plenty of children." The book was beyond Kit. He ploughed through it like the direct and rather simple creature that he was, a frontiersman blazing a trail, hacking his way, aware only of the very obvious trees and the general lie of the landscape. Molly was too subtle for him. He missed her park-like pieces, the little bosky thickets where the modern nymph twisted the tail of the unfortunate and bewildered faun. He was blind to her social vignettes, her little cameos of sophisticated colour, her raillery, her devilish mischievousness

"Well, I'm dashed!"

It seemed to him beside the mark, and he was inclined to sympathize with Mrs. Perdita, but when he came to discuss the book with Orange he was surprised to find that his friend did not agree with him.

"She thinks that she has written the epitaph on marriage. Supposed to be rather out of date, you know, the reaction against marriage."

"You mean that she is mocking at a thing—that is dead."

"In a way."

"But, good Lord, my dear man, what—is—the alternative?"

Orange, with his pale face bending down and brooding with its sombre irony, took a little time to answer.