Chapter 9 - Page 2

line of succession."

"Oh, yes, she'd know that," put in Feather.

It was Coombe who smiled now--very faintly.

"You have a mistaken view of her," he said.

"You admire her very much," Feather bridled. The figure of this
big Scotch creature with her "line" and her "splendid grace and
harmony" was enough to make one bridle.

"She doesn't admire me," said Coombe. "She is not proud of me as
a connection. She doesn't really want the position for the boy,
in her heart of hearts."

"Doesn't want it!" Feather's exclamation was a little jeer only
because she would not have dared a big one.

"She is Scotch Early Victorian in some things and extremely advanced
in others," he went on. "She has strong ideas of her own as to
how he shall be brought up. She's rather Greek in her feeling for
his being as perfect physically and mentally as she can help him
to be. She believes things. It was she who said what you did not
understand--about the Creative Intention."

"I suppose she is religious," Feather said. "Scotch people often
are but their religion isn't usually like that. Creative Intention's
a new name for God, I suppose. I ought to know all about God. I've
heard enough about Him. My father was not a clergyman but he was
very miserable, and it made him so religious that he was ALMOST
one. We were every one of us christened and catechized and confirmed
and all that. So God's rather an old story."

"Queer how old--from Greenland's icy mountains to India's coral
strand," said Coombe. "It's an ancient search--that for the
Idea--whether it takes form in metal or wood or stone."

"Well," said Feather, holding her bit of gauze away from her
the better to criticize the pink flower. "As ALMOST a clergyman's
daughter I must say that if there is one tiling God didn't do, it
was to fill the world with beautiful people and things as if it
was only to be happy in. It was made to-to try us by suffering
and-that sort of thing. It's a-a-what d'ye call it? Something
beginning with P."

"Probation," suggested Coombe regarding her with an expression of
speculative interest. Her airy bringing forth of her glib time-worn
little scraps of orthodoxy--as one who fished them out of a bag of
long-discarded remnants of rubbish--was so true to type that it
almost fascinated him for a moment.

"Yes. That's it--probation," she answered. "I knew it began with
a P. It means 'thorny paths' and 'seas of blood' and, if you are
religious, you 'tread them with bleeding feet--' or swim them as
the people do in