Two Worlds and Their Ways by Ivy Compton-Burnett

Author:Ivy Compton-Burnett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter V

“My Little Son!” said Maria, standing on her steps. “So you are glad to see your mother.”

“We got out of the train first. The other boys had quite a long way to go. It is better to live near the school. The holidays begin sooner. Being in the train is not really holidays, is it?”

“He is just the same,” said Maria to her husband, confronted by no advance on the surface, and unable to see beneath. “We need not have thought he would change.”

“People don’t change, do they?” said her son. “Everyone is always the person he is.”

“Out of the mouth of babes!” said Maria.

“How are you, my boy?” said Sir Roderick, shaking hands with his elder son, after his embrace of the younger.

“I am well, but I have changed.”

“Have you retired from your profession?” said Mr. Firebrace, with no sign of his joy in the reunion. “Has it done for you what you hoped?”

“No, but it has done other things.”

“You have gained your knowledge of life?”

“No, but I have gained knowledge of lives.”

“And that is not the same thing?”

“No, it is a deeper, more demanding thing. It is a change from the shallow to the deep. It seems to add less to the person who has it, and really adds more. It has made me a student of human nature instead of a man of the world. I don’t think I shall ever be a man of the world again.”

“Were you ever one?” said Maria.

“I dare to answer the question. I still have my own kind of courage. Strange though it was in my useless, narrow life, that is what I was. It is a sheltered life that makes such people. If you think, they always belong to the privileged class. And if you think again, Father is one.”

“Will you be a happier person for the experiment?”

“Not happier, but better. I shall see people’s problems beneath the surface. And that is the last thing a man of the world does. He thinks that people do not have problems in their position.”

“Well, they do not,” said Sir Roderick, with a smile.

“Well, are not the brother and sister going to greet each other?” said Maria, passing to a point of interest.

Clemence and Sefton, who had done this at once in their own way, now did it in their mother’s.

Miss Petticott came into the hall, and Sefton gave her an excited welcome, suffered the unavoidable salute and even returned it. Clemence looked on with feelings that she hardly defined. To her eyes there was a change in her brother. She seemed to see in him something that she knew in herself. He might almost be doing what she had done, might be laying the foundations for things that would need them.

“Well, the group is complete,” said Maria, allowing the three to withdraw in their established way. “I wonder what we did in separating them? I suppose we shall never know.”

“I have always known,” said her husband. “We did a heartless and harmful and needless thing.

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