"Nevertheless," I said, "I may some day allow you to put my actions
into the crucible, and see if you can find my real motives. I confess
I do not understand myself, and I have nothing to conceal. I think I
should rather like to be analysed."

"Then I may come again?" he asked.

"You may come to be photographed, of course," I replied.

I wonder how old he is, and what he does!

CHAPTER XIII

WHITSUNTIDE EXPERIENCES

New sensations have elbowed and jostled each other to secure my special
attention this Whitsuntide, until I have been positively alarmed for my
mental equilibrium. The good people here seem so sedate on ordinary
occasions that one fails to realise that after all there is a good deal
of the peacock and the kitten in the make-up of many of them; but
Whitsuntide reveals this.

The peacock in them manifests itself as they strut up and down in new
clothing of brilliant dye, affecting an unconsciousness and unconcern
which deceives nobody. The shocks I received during that memorable
Sunday, when the village turned out in its new finery, I still
experience, like the after-tremors of an earthquake.

Pray do not imagine that Windyridge knows nothing of the rule of
fashion. Every mother's daughter, though not every daughter's mother,
owns her sway and is her devoted subject. If the imperious Dame bids
her votaries hobble, the Windyridge belle limps awkwardly to and
fro--on Sundays and feast days--in proud and painful obedience,
heedless of the unconcealed sneers and contempt of her elders. If
headgear after the form of the beehive or the castle of the termite ant
is decreed, she counts it a joy, like any fashionable lady of fortune,
to suffer the eclipse of her good looks under the vilest monstrosity
the milliner's ingenuity can devise. Ah, me! How fine a line, after
all, divides Windyridge from Mayfair!

The kitten in them gambols and makes fun whole-heartedly for several
hours at a stretch on the afternoon of Whit Monday, and with such
kindliness and good humour that one cannot help feeling that the world
is very young and one's self not so very old either.

I thought the rain was going to spoil everything. Day by day for a
week it had come down with a steady determination that seemed to mean
the ruin of holiday prospects. The foliage certainly looked all the
fresher for it, and the ash took heart to burst its black buds and help
to swell the harmony of the woods. But these are aes