Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/377

 "I think you would be," he said, "if he understood you as you understand him."

Tom Roland, leaning over his Italian well-head, and looking at Narcissus, while he smoked an after-dinner cigar, gave Sorrell the product of his reflections.

"Both right. But Molly is right for ten years, Kit for ten minutes."

"Is that quite fair? Some of us have an extraordinary capacity for caring."

"I know. Kit has. But then—it always seems to me that when a young man storms a tower with the idea of keeping it—and not just sacking it and treating it as a sexual orgy, he doesn't quite foresee the funny ways of the civil population. A tyrant is all very well. Your civilians have to be humoured. And Molly understands that. A dual throne, you know, and a happy handling of the fool mob. Kit might storm his town, but Molly is thinking of the fool mob that might be asking for free wireless sets ten years hence. Molly has vision."

"I know what you mean. If Kit"

Roland caressed the carved stone.

"Stephen, old chap, hasn't it struck you that woman's cleverness is a different sort of cleverness from ours? In some ways I feel myself a sort of child with Cherry. And there you are! A clever woman may love the simpler sort of man,—and never let him suspect her cleverness. Contrasts. She spins a conspiring web about him. Something maternal, too. And provided that the man is a happy lad, and not an inflated—listen-to-me—my dear—sort of ass"

"And not a bore."

"Oh, a woman will stand a lot of boring from her particular man."

"Aren't you rather flattering the women?"

"Some of 'em. As for Molly and Kit, these sort of problems seem to solve themselves. Things happen—if both parties really want them to happen."

Unknown to Christopher his father became the friend of