Philip accepted the invitation.  They were quite a party.  There were the two daughters of the Frau Professor, the two other girls, one of the American students, and Philip.  Philip walked by the side of Anna and Fraulein Hedwig.  He was a little fluttered.  He had never known any girls.  At Blackstable there were only the farmers’ daughters and the girls of the local tradesmen.  He knew them by name and by sight, but he was timid, and he thought they laughed at his deformity.  He accepted willingly the difference which the Vicar and Mrs. Carey put between their own exalted rank and that of the farmers.  The doctor had two daughters, but they were both much older than Philip and had been married to successive assistants while Philip was still a small boy.  At school there had been two or three girls of more boldness than modesty whom some of the boys knew; and desperate stories, due in all probability to the masculine imagination, were told of intrigues with them; but Philip had always concealed under a lofty contempt the terror with which they filled him.  His imagination and the books he had read had inspired in him a desire for the Byronic attitude; and he was torn between a morbid self-consciousness and a conviction that he owed it to himself to be gallant.  He felt now that he should be bright and amusing, but his brain seemed empty and he could not for the life of him think of anything to say.  Fraulein Anna, the Frau Professor’s daughter, addressed herself to him frequently from a sense of duty, but the other said little:  she looked at him now and then with sparkling eyes, and sometimes to his confusion laughed outright.  Philip felt that she thought him perfectly ridiculous.  They walked along the side of a hill among pine-trees, and their pleasant odour caused Philip a keen delight.  The day was warm and cloudless.  At last they came to an eminence from which they saw the valley of the Rhine spread out before them under the sun.  It was a vast stretch of country, sparkling with golden light, with cities in the distance; and through it meandered the silver ribband of the river.  Wide spaces are rare in the corner of Kent which Philip knew, the sea offers the only broad horizon, and the immense distance he saw now gave him a peculiar, an indescribable thrill.  He felt suddenly elated.  Though he did not know it, it was the first time that he had experienced, quite undiluted with foreign emotions, the sense of beauty.  They sat on a bench, the three of them, for the others had gone on, and while the girls talked in rapid German, Philip, indifferent to their proximity, feasted his eyes.

“By Jove, I am happy,” he said to himself unconsciously.

XXIII

Philip thought occasionally of the King’s School at Tercanbury, and laughed to himself as he remembered what at some particular moment of the day they were doing.  Now and then he dreamed that he was there still, and it gave him an extraordinary satisfaction, on awaking, to realise that he was in his little room in the turret.  From his bed he could see the great cumulus clouds that hung in the blue sky.  He revelled in his freedom.  He could go to bed when he chose and get up when the fancy took him.  There was no one to order him about.  It struck him that he need not tell any more lies.