________________________________________________
_ The season was drawing to its dusty end, and everyone I knew
was arranging to go away. Mrs. Strickland was taking her
family to the coast of Norfolk, so that the children might
have the sea and her husband golf. We said good-bye to one
another, and arranged to meet in the autumn. But on my last
day in town, coming out of the Stores, I met her with her son
and daughter; like myself, she had been making her final
purchases before leaving London, and we were both hot and tired.
I proposed that we should all go and eat ices in the park.
I think Mrs. Strickland was glad to show me her children,
and she accepted my invitation with alacrity. They were even
more attractive than their photographs had suggested, and she was
right to be proud of them. I was young enough for them not to
feel shy, and they chattered merrily about one thing and another.
They were extraordinarily nice, healthy young children.
It was very agreeable under the trees.
When in an hour they crowded into a cab to go home, I strolled
idly to my club. I was perhaps a little lonely, and it was
with a touch of envy that I thought of the pleasant family
life of which I had had a glimpse. They seemed devoted to one
another. They had little private jokes of their own which,
unintelligible to the outsider, amused them enormously.
Perhaps Charles Strickland was dull judged by a standard that
demanded above all things verbal scintillation; but his
intelligence was adequate to his surroundings, and that is a
passport, not only to reasonable success, but still more to
happiness. Mrs. Strickland was a charming woman, and she
loved him. I pictured their lives, troubled by no untoward
adventure, honest, decent, and, by reason of those two
upstanding, pleasant children, so obviously destined to carry
on the normal traditions of their race and station,
not without significance. They would grow old insensibly;
they would see their son and daughter come to years of reason,
marry in due course -- the one a pretty girl, future mother of
healthy children; the other a handsome, manly fellow,
obviously a soldier; and at last, prosperous in their
dignified retirement, beloved by their descendants, after a happy,
not unuseful life, in the fullness of their age they would
sink into the grave.
That must be the story of innumerable couples, and the pattern
of life it offers has a homely grace. It reminds you of a
placid rivulet, meandering smoothly through green pastures and
shaded by pleasant trees, till at last it falls into the vasty
sea; but the sea is so calm, so silent, so indifferent, that
you are troubled suddenly by a vague uneasiness. Perhaps it
is only by a kink in my nature, strong in me even in those days,
that I felt in such an existence, the share of the great
majority, something amiss. I recognised its social values,
I saw its ordered happiness, but a fever in my blood asked for a
wilder course. There seemed to me something alarming in such
easy delights. In my heart was a desire to live more dangerously.
I was not unprepared for jagged rocks and treacherous shoals if
I could only have change -- change and the excitement of
the unforeseen. _
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