The Clerk of the Court would have asked to accompany him to the Manor
Cartier, but he was not sure that Jean Jacques would like it. He had a
feeling that Jean Jacques would wish to have his dark hour alone. So he
remained silent, and Jean Jacques touched his horses with the whip.
After starting, however, and having been followed for a hundred yards or
so by the pitying murmurs and a few I-told-you-so's and revilings for
having married as he did, Jean Jacques stopped the ponies. Standing up
in the red wagon he looked round for someone whom, for a moment, he did
not see in the slowly shifting crowd.
Philosophy was all very well, and he had courageously given his
allegiance to it, or a formula of it, a moment before; but there was
something deeper and rarer still in the little man's soul. His heart
hungered for the two women who had been the joy and pride of his life,
even when he had been lost in the business of the material world. They
were more to him than he had ever known; they were parts of himself which
had slowly developed, as the features and characteristics of ancestors
gradually emerge and are emphasized in a descendant as his years
increase.
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