Page:Walpole - Fortitude.djvu/346

 she stands, loving Peter with all her heart and soul, terrified out of her wits at the possibilities that life is presenting to her, hating Peter's friends at one moment, his work the next, the baby the next—exactly like some one, walking on a window-ledge in his sleep and suddenly waking and discovering—

“Peter's a more difficult question. He's too riotously happy just at the moment to listen to a word from any one. His relation to the child is really the most touching thing you ever saw, and really the child, considering that it has scarcely begun to exist, has a feeling for him in the most wonderful way. It is as good as gold when he is there and follows him with its eyes—it doesn't pay much attention to Clare. I think it knows that she's frightened of it. Yes, Peter is quite riotously happy. You know that ‘The Stone House’ is coming out next week. There is to be a supper party at the Galleons'—myself, Mrs. Launce, Maradick, the Gales, some woman he knew at that boarding-house, Cardillac and Dr. and Mrs. Rossiter.

“By the way, Cardillac is there a great deal and I am both glad and sorry. He is very good for Clare and not at all good for Peter. He seems to understand Clare in the most wonderful way—far better than Peter does. He brings her out, helps her to be broader and really I think explains Peter to her and helps things along. His influence on Peter is all the other way. Peter, of course, worships him, just as he used to do in the old days at school, and Cards always liked being worshipped. He has an elegance, a savoir-faire that dear, square-shouldered rough-and-tumble Peter finds entrancing, but, of course, Peter's worth the dozen of him any day of the week. He drags out all Peter's worst side. I wonder whether you'll understand what I mean when I say that Peter isn't meant to be happy—at any rate not yet. He's got something too big, too tremendous in him to be carved easily into any one of our humdrum, conventional shapes. He takes things so hard that he isn't intended to take more than one thing at a time, and here he is with Clare and Cards both, as it seems to me, in a conspiracy to pull him into a thousand little bits and to fling each little bit to a different tea-party.