Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/375

 "Through marriage? I dare say not. But any other sort of relationship, awkward, delicate"

"Don't, pater," said the son. "I have made up my mind as to that."

The making up of Christopher's mind was more full of the subconscious process than he knew. We may design our ethical clothes to disguise our desires, the passion for complete and individual possession, the lust of the hunter to kill, all the old moral rages of the "jealous God," but the sublimated elements are there. Molly was wiser than the man.

Pursued, she knew that complete capture cannot be tolerated by a woman who has her life to live. Even as the Amazons burned off their right breasts in order to use bow and sword the better, so Molly knew that a woman with a creative urge other than the urge towards motherhood, may be happier with no breasts at all.

As she said to Cherry—"Kit thinks he is being the noble fellow, when he is nothing but a romantic male tyrant."

"I don't suppose he thinks about it—at all," said Cherry; "we go the way we are pushed."

"Every man is at least a lawyer. He wants the human document signed and sealed."

Incidentally, she met Sorrell. They were brought together by chance in Cherry's music-room, and the old gladiator and the Amazon sat down together and crossed glances. She had smiled straight into his eyes with a gleam of humorous defiance. She assumed that he knew everything, which he did. Their mutual introduction would have astonished Christopher. They seemed to understand each other from the very first, responding to a temperamental sympathy, those flashes—half intuitive—half inspired. Sorrell had given himself to his garden, but he was somewhat wise as to women. And as he looked at this frank, fearless, fastidious creature with her deep eyes and her expressive mouth, he thought of Kit's boyishness.

"Is it war or peace?" she asked him.

She understood his smile. Here was a man who knew something of life as it was lived.

"I am Kit's father."

"And his mother."

Sorrell nodded.