You can't
make the columbine flowers nod in January, nor make the cuckoo sing in
England at Christmas. Why? It isn't his season. He doesn't want to. Nay,
he _can't_ want to.
And there it was with Egbert. He couldn't link up with the world's work,
because the basic desire was absent from him. Nay, at the bottom of him
he had an even stronger desire: to hold aloof. To hold aloof. To do
nobody any damage. But to hold aloof. It was not his season.
Perhaps he should not have married and had children. But you can't stop
the waters flowing.
Which held true for Winifred, too. She was not made to endure aloof. Her
family tree was a robust vegetation that had to be stirring and
believing. In one direction or another her life _had_ to go. In her own
home she had known nothing of this diffidence which she found in Egbert,
and which she could not understand, and which threw her into such dismay.
What was she to do, what was she to do, in face of this terrible
diffidence?
It was all so different in her own home. Her father may have had his own
misgivings, but he kept them to himself. Perhaps he had no very profound
belief in this world of ours, this society which we have elaborated with
so much effort, only to find ourselves elaborated to death at last. But
Godfrey Marshall was of tough, rough fibre, not without a vein of
healthy cunning through it all. It was for him a question of winning
through, and leaving the rest to heaven.
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