"Why, Robert, it's better than if you were my own
son; it's as though in you I had a little of those two always with me."
"Christine, you won't ever leave me, will you?"
For now his fear had him by the throat. She didn't--she never had
belonged to him. It was his father and his mother, who were dead.
"Of course not--not so long as you need me. You mustn't worry. It's
because we're both tired and hungry. We'll get supper."
Her voice was its old self. But whilst she laid the cloth he stood
pressed against the window and looked out with blind eyes into the
darkness, so that she should not see his slow, hot tears. He was aware
of great and bitter loss. But he loved Christine more than he had ever
done. His love had ceased to be instinctive. It had become conscious
of itself and of her separateness. And it would never be quite free
again from pain.
III
1
Long before he could read words of three syllables, Robert had learnt the
Origin of Man, and had made a vivid, somewhat fanciful picture of that
personage's pathetic beginnings as a miasm floating on the earth's
surface, and of his accidental, no less pathetic progression as a Survival
of the Fittest. He gathered that even more than old Jaegers, Mr. Ricardo
hated God Almighty and Jesus Christ, the latter of whom was intimately
connected with something called a Sun Myth--chiefly, Robert supposed,
because He was the Son of God. Mr. Ricardo could not leave these two
alone.
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