She was the embodiment of everything that he had
heard pass in the distance from the silent dusks of Acacia
Grove--splendour and power, laughter and music, the beat of a secret pulse
answering the tread of invisible processions. She came riding out of the
mists of his fancy into light, a living reality that he could take hold
of, and set up in his empty temple. She was not his mother, nor Francey,
nor God, but she was everything that in their vague and different ways
these three had been to him before he lost them. She was something to be
worshipped, to be died for, if necessary, with joy and pride.
But in a moment it was over. She looked away from him and rode forward,
like a monarch into a grandly illuminated castle, amidst the whispered
plaudits of her people.
A little girl on a Shetland pony rode at her heels, Robert saw her without
wanting to see her. She obtruded herself vulgarly. She was dressed as a
page, her painfully thin legs looking like sticks of peppermint in their
parti-coloured tights, and either was, or pretended to be, terrified of
her minute and tubbily good-natured mount. At its first move forward she
fell upon its neck with shrill screams and clung on grotesquely, righting
herself at last to make mock faces at the grinning crowd.
"Oh, la, la--la-la!"
She was a plain child with a large nose, slightly Jewish in line, a wide
mouth, and a mass of crinkly fair hair that stood out in a pert halo about
her head.
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