1

The Virtuous Stepmother

1.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, London contained quite a number of distinguished, grey-headed bachelors who owed their celibacy to Mrs Varden Cocks. In her youth she had refused offers of marriage from most of them and they found themselves unable to choose again when she tardily but finally dashed their several ambitions by selecting Varden. Indeed they almost gloried in their shackles, for this lady had reached, at forty-seven, the very zenith of her attractions. She was excessively handsome in the liberal style of the First Empire, and endowed with a wit in keeping with her appearance. She talked a great deal, in a rich, temperamental contralto, and had fine eyes which spoke for her in her rare silences. Her photographs were seldom successful since few of her friends were acquainted with her face in repose.

The fatigued erudition of her husband set off her animation with an especial piquancy. He had been a distinguished scholar when she married him and was, subsequently, never heard to speak. At intervals she would discuss with her friends the advantages of a political career for him, but his views on the subject were not known. He was, fortunately, very tolerably well off.

They had one child, a beautiful but silent daughter, who accompanied them to most places of entertainment and whose wardrobe was a perpetual testimony to a mother’s taste. It was generally believed that Agatha Cocks was a very nice girl and everyone was pleased when she became engaged, a few months after her introduction, to an entirely suitable young man, a baronet, wealthy, and devotedly attached. Mrs Cocks, who believed in early marriages for young women, was overjoyed. The bridegroom had an additional advantage; he possessed a most exceptional stepmother. Mrs Cocks was accustomed to point out that a stepmother-in-law, of the right kind, is so much easier for a young bride to get on with than the usual mother-in-law. She is less likely to interfere; she has fewer claims. The dowager Lady Clewer was this kind of stepmother. She was a perfect monument of tact. ‘I had thought,’ Mrs Cocks would say in her rapid, vibrant voice, ‘I had thought it to be impossible for a widow and a widower, each with children, to marry and produce a third family without a certain amount of storm and stress. But the Clewers have undoubtedly done it! There they all are, his sons and her daughter, and their child (I forget its sex), living together in perfect peace and amity. But then of course she is unique … and he died pretty soon….’ One evening, about ten days before the wedding, this paragon gave a dinner party to which Mrs Cocks took her family. None of the trio anticipated a very pleasant evening, but only Mrs Cocks said so, since she alone could talk audibly and without discomfort while driving through London traffic. Her gloomy forebodings enlivened the entire journey from South Kensington to Eaton Square. This sort of party, she said, was apt to be trying. ‘It isn’t as if you didn’t know all your in-laws already,’ she complained. ‘You’ve met them all by now, haven’t you? Except the mentally deficient one. To go on meeting in this way is quite unnecessary, I don’t gather that anyone will be there in the least congenial to me. Or to your father. Only Clewer relations, I expect. I shouldn’t wonder if there aren’t enough men to go round. That’s what people generally mean when they call a dinner “quite informal.” I hate a superfluity of women. Even dull men are better than none.’

Agatha sighed. She was disturbed by the tinge of petulance in these remarks. She had never supposed that the vogue of John’s stepmother would last for ever, since Mrs Cocks was very variable in her friendships and, before the engagement, had been accustomed to remember that Lady Clewer’s first husband had been some kind of successful Northern manufacturer, that the upholstered prosperity which her money had brought to Lyndon gave it a very odd look, and that Lois Martin, the manufacturer’s daughter, was rather a second-rate little person. All this she had, for the moment, comfortably forgotten, but Agatha had little doubt but that the Martin vulgarity must be, eventually, disinterred. Only she had hoped for fair weather until after the wedding, and she sighed because she feared that a dull dinner at this point would be most inopportune.

It was, unfortunately, very dull indeed. Besides Varden there were but two men present—Sir John Clewer, the host and bridegroom, and a sadly stolid Major Talbot, his uncle. These failed to inspire the ladies with any sort of liveliness. Depression, like a murky fog, hung over the tasteful brilliance of Lady Clewer’s table and barely lifted with the appearance of dessert, when the company rallied a little, sustained by the prospect of release. Mrs Cocks, with some show of animation, embarked upon the conquest of Major Talbot and was soon discoursing fluently to him about the government of India. At the other end of the table old Mrs Gordon Clewer, John’s great-aunt, was making her neighbours laugh. Her butt was probably the rising generation, a topic upon which she was in the habit of being funny in the epigrammatic style of the early ’nineties. The sulky face of little Lois Martin suggested that some shaft had gone home. Lois did not know what to make of Mrs Gordon Clewer. Against old ladies who were not thus entirely surrendered to age she had the weapons of youth and personal attraction. But this small, terrifying woman, with her sharp tongue, her arrogant dowdiness and her quaint curled fringe, was invulnerable. She was securely entrenched in the past and made Lois feel disconcertingly raw: mere prettiness went for nothing with her, she had seen so much of it in her time. Her high incisive tones rang out in a sudden pause while Mrs Cocks was eating a marron glacé:

‘… a whole roomful, I assure you, all dancing in this concentrated, painstaking way; all with this stupefied air. No conversation, you understand; almost like convicts taking exercise. “Good heavens, my dear!” I said to Lady Peel. “What has happened to them all? Surely the ventilation is insufficient? The children appear to me positively abrutis! And why do they never change their partners?” “Oh,” she said, “it isn’t the ventilation. They always look like that now somehow. And they can’t change their partners. You know it’s this new American dance, the … the Tango, and it’s very difficult….”’

Lois decided that Youth must speak; an attack like this could not be endured in silence. She leant across the table and inquired rather aggressively, in a voice loud enough to be generally heard:

‘I say, Agatha, don’t you think those old Victorian times, when they danced nothing but stupid old waltzes, must have been perfectly beastly?’

‘Perfectly beastly!’ murmured Mrs Gordon Clewer joyfully, as though committing the phrase to memory for some future narrative.

It was an unhappy expression: everyone was acutely aware of its stark unsuitability. Poor Lady Clewer, crimson with mortification, was but too sure of the manner in which Mrs Gordon Clewer would tell the tale:

‘… That Martin child, Marian Clewer’s daughter by her first marriage. A really horrid memorial of poor Marian’s remoter past. One wonders so what the father was like. Of course, one always thinks, looking at the girl, that Martin isn’t a Jewish name. Marian is so clever with her—dressing her rather inconspicuously in pale pink, don’t you know? But what was it she said? Oh, yes! … Perfectly beastly!’

The unhappy mother plunged into a general discourse upon dancing in a vain attempt to cover her daughter’s lapse. Was it true that the Queen disapproved of these new American dances? But Mrs Gordon Clewer was too much pleased with the situation to destroy it.

‘Well, child?’ she demanded sharply of Agatha. ‘What do you think? Do you consider the customs of your elders … er … perfectly beastly?’

The entire table waited to hear the young bride’s opinion.

Agatha hesitated, not liking her position. Under her mother’s quelling eye she dared not agree with Lois. But to disagree would be a sorry course and hardly sincere in a person of her years. With all the courtesy due to John’s great-aunt she must make a stand for her own generation. So she smiled very prettily at Mrs Gordon Clewer and said:

‘You know, I can never quite make out what the customs of my elders were exactly. There are such discrepancies in the accounts one gets. This matter of partners, for instance! I’ve been told that nice girls never danced more than three times with the same man. But … I find it very difficult to believe. Because once I was tidying an old bureau for my mother, and I came upon some of her dance programmes….’

‘Never tell me I danced the whole evening with one man!’ broke in Mrs Cocks.

‘No, Mother! With two.’

They laughed, and she felt that she had not done badly. She had been a little impertinent, but they apparently forgave her for it. Catching the sparkle of approval in her lover’s eye, she felt her heart leap with pleasure.

‘No good, Mrs Cocks,’ Major Talbot was saying to her protesting mother, ‘you should have burnt ’em, y’know.’

Lady Clewer, however, did not look pleased. Scarcely recovered from the irritation of her daughter’s exposure, she found nothing soothing in the spectacle of Agatha’s discretion. Ill-temper was written clearly upon her smooth, fresh face, furrowing her still youthful brow, and emphasizing the massiveness of her jaw. She had the air of rehearsing to herself all the caustic reproofs which Lois should hear when the company departed. She glanced round the room, preparatory to rising, and her little blue eyes were ominous—hard as pebbles. The five women left the dining-room in an atmosphere of heavy displeasure.

Upstairs they found Cynthia, the youngest of the Clewers. This was the solitary child of Marian’s second marriage. At fourteen she did not dine downstairs but came into the drawing-room for a short time after her schoolroom supper. She was an exquisite creature, slim but well grown, with a mane of shining hair the colour of honey. She had her mother’s flawless skin, but her sharp eyes were dark and set rather close together in the creamy oval of her face. She advanced and made her civilities to the guests with cool self-possession. Lady Clewer immediately demanded, with unconcealed impatience, where James might be. Cynthia replied that he would not come, though Miss Barrington had said that he ought. Lady Clewer’s jaw became grim and she was preparing to send for James on the instant when Cynthia demurely added that he had gone to bed. He had further threatened to come down in his pyjamas if anyone bothered him. Lady Clewer sharply bade her daughter to have done, and Cynthia was silent, her keen eyes flitting from face to face. She secretly enjoyed these trying situations invariably created by James; they gave variety to a monotonous life.

The guests were embarrassed at this exposure of the family skeleton. James, the younger brother of John, was supposed to be a little queer in the head. This was due to nothing ‘in the family,’ as his stepmother had carefully explained to Mrs Cocks when the engagement was pending. She believed that she had traced it to an injury to the brain received by James at the age of seven months. The first Lady Clewer had died at his birth and he had not acquired a stepmother until he was almost six years old; it must have been during the period when he lacked a mother’s care that the harm was done. The servants, who had tended him, could at first remember no accident and indignantly denied Marian’s accusations of neglect. But under her astute cross-examination they contradicted themselves and each other, and it became established that there had been a fall. Marian, who had thought the child alarmingly backward, discovered that her worst fears were confirmed. She consulted a specialist immediately; he looked grave but would say nothing save that the child was abnormal. This abnormality became more marked as James grew older. Nothing, it seemed, could be done. At twenty-one he could not be depended upon sufficiently, in the matter of table manners, to dine with the family. He shared Cynthia’s schoolroom meals, and his stepmother, always anxious to make the best of him, had decreed that he should be in the drawing-room every evening after dinner.

He had but recently come up to town with Cynthia and the governess, and Agatha had hitherto escaped the introduction. She dreaded it, fearing that she would find him very disagreeable. His future was, she knew, uncertain. Hitherto the whole family had lived at Lyndon, John’s property in Oxfordshire. But, upon his marriage, the dowager intended to settle with her daughters in the Eaton Square house which had been left to her by her second husband. She had offered to warehouse James for a time until the young couple, comfortably settled at Lyndon, could make up their minds what to do with him. Agatha had a secret fear that they might have to invite him to live with them.

She had never seen Lyndon, but she understood it to be an imposing mid-Georgian affair, well stocked with the proper sort of furniture and portraits. Sometimes she wondered whether Marian had been able to impose as much of her essential mediocrity there as in Eaton Square. She had such a faculty for making nice things look insignificant, to all her possessions she seemed able to impart a hard, shining newness. Old things looked quite modern when she got hold of them. And her rooms were always so very full of chesterfields; they had struck Agatha’s attention when calling in Eaton Square for the first time, and were all she could remember of the drawing-room when she was not in it, save perhaps a portrait of the mother of James and John which hung over the fireplace.

This picture had interested her. The sheen of the green velvet gown, cut in the aesthetic style of the ’eighties, toned well with the green Sèvres on the chimneypiece and was painted with unquestionable ability. The brooding peevishness of the face, however, gave food for reflection. It was a discordant note in a complacent room, suggesting a hidden, bygone rebellion, beyond the power of time to cancel. Glancing towards it, Agatha perceived with surprise that it was gone. A large looking-glass hung in its place. Lady Clewer, observing the direction of her eyes, became extremely benevolent and important:

‘Ah, the portrait! Yes, it’s gone. I’ve sent it down to Lyndon. Oh, yes, it’s always hung here … But I thought … John’s mother … he ought to have it….’

Everyone felt how right this was and Mrs Cocks warmly said so. Marian, beaming, said that it must hang in John’s study. Agatha murmured something pretty, but she privately believed that John would not want it in his study. She happened to know that he hated it. He had a photograph, which he much preferred, in which his mother was wearing the clothes he best remembered, a little sailor hat, a blouse with full sleeves and a broad, tight belt. She was sitting on the south terrace at Lyndon between two dogs. The portrait was certainly less cheerful.

Mrs Gordon Clewer, who had been clucking to herself, now startled Agatha by observing:

‘If John takes after his father he won’t want it. My poor nephew couldn’t do with it at all. That’s why he wouldn’t have it at Lyndon. It was a great deal too good. And that gown was symbolical of so much in poor Mary that he couldn’t abide. She got the greeny-yallery craze very badly and would go about looking like an invertebrate Burne-Jones. That’s a little trying, you know, for a man who likes his wife to be well corseted. Smart women in those days had waists. Nowadays we condemn waists as artificial; but a man like John appreciates a certain amount of artificiality in a woman as a tribute to civilization, you understand. And, if I’m not mistaken, his son takes after him.’

She shot a glance at Agatha.

‘The portrait has always been considered a very good one,’ said Marian in an offended tone.

‘Oh, very clever! Undeniably clever!’ agreed Mrs Gordon Clewer. ‘It was a very clever young man who painted it. A protégé of one of Mary’s peculiar artistic friends. Rather du peuple, you know, but that was really what gave him distinction. The other artists of the period were mostly gentlemen, or, at any rate, cultured. He came down to Lyndon to paint her, I remember, and if you met him about the house you were apt to mistake him for some tubercular under-gardener or something, come in to water the plants. It’s a pity he died so young. He would have distinguished himself. As it was, John would never believe that he really had talent. He used to ask Mary why she must bring such people into the house and why she couldn’t get the thing done by somebody really good. Poor Mary! How furious she used to be!’

‘Cynthia! Isn’t it your bedtime?’ inquired Marian with meaning.

It was not, and she knew it, but Mrs Gordon Clewer must really be reminded that poor John was Cynthia’s father. She was going a little too far, even for an old lady. Perhaps she felt so herself, for, after a few seconds, she added sweetly:

‘Of course it’s wonderful of you to have given it up, my dear Marian. And so like you! You have a positive flair for this sort of thing.’

Lady Clewer was not quite sure in her own mind what a flair was, but she took the remark as a compliment, as it was undoubtedly meant.

2.

Lois at the piano did much to relieve the languors of the evening. It was an employment in which she always appeared to advantage, having good hands and arms. Her mother, fully sensible of this, encouraged her music. She had a little talent and a great deal of temperament—qualities which urged her towards musical composition. She had written several ‘Tone Cycles,’ which sounded very effective when she sang them. Tonight, however, she larded these more intellectual items in her repertoire with a few simple love songs out of compliment to John and Agatha, who were sitting together on a distant sofa looking at photographs of Lyndon. Cynthia, who never relaxed a sidelong surveillance, was forced to decide that they were dull lovers. They were, indeed, far too well bred to betray themselves by any form of public endearment; their very conversation, though pitched too low to reach the others, was pointedly impersonal.

John appreciated immensely this discreet semi-privacy; it was symbolical of his entire courtship. He had chosen his bride for her gravity and for the sedate composure of her manner, enchanted to find so much reserve and dignity in anything so young. He did not generally care for girls, disliking their vivacity and finding no recondite charms in inexperience. He had always looked forward to marriage as a duty, inevitable, but infinitely boring and to be postponed if possible.

He had not danced above two or three times with the silent Miss Cocks, however, before he began to be aware that duty can be agreeably reinforced by inclination. Here at last was a girl, beautiful and innocent, yet possessed of a delicate and deliberate assurance;she sampled life discriminately, never losing her poise and never permitting herself to be engulfed. He was vastly pleased to find that he could be so completely in love.

The brevity of their courtship had given them few opportunities for intimate conversation, but he had seen all that he wanted. He suspected that she might be naturally cold in temperament, but this, in a wife, did not displease him. He had no great opinion of fond women, for he had encountered too many of them. Agatha was like none of her predecessors. He could almost enjoy the barriers put upon their intercourse. These decorous weeks, with their wealth of social functions, were like a prologue to the bridal day when, veiled and mysterious, she should be given entirely into his possession. The prolonged privacy of the honeymoon would give him leisure enough in which to contemplate and examine his prize. He was content meanwhile just to watch her as she bent over his photographs and to mark, with a recurrent shock of pleasure, the still pose of her little head. Though she seldom raised her eyes, he was quite sure that she knew all about the admiration in his regard. She had, in such matters, an intuition which she had probably inherited from her mother.

For that mother he had the warmest admiration, since to her training and experience he ascribed many of his bride’s perfections. His good opinion was amply returned. Mrs Cocks could not praise him enough to Mrs Gordon Clewer; he was an ideal son-in-law. The two ladies sat on an enormous chesterfield in the middle of the room, conversing in undertones because of the music. Mrs Gordon Clewer nodded and chuckled. She, too, had a good opinion of John. He was her favourite great-nephew. The boy had taste. She had always prophesied that he would choose well.

‘And your girl, too,’ she added, ‘I remember saying at the beginning of the Season that you wouldn’t have her on your hands for long.’

‘I’m very glad she’s marrying so promptly,’ said Mrs Cocks. ‘I do believe in girls marrying young. Of course, she’s very young; only just eighteen. But it’s so much easier and wiser for them to marry before they form their tastes too much, don’t you think?’

‘Dear me, yes! They get such decided opinions once they are past twenty, that there’s no doing anything with them.’

The old lady took a good look at the unformed Agatha through a small quizzing glass, adding:

‘She’s being so pretty behaved over those photographs, it’s quite a pleasure to watch them. I’ve known you long enough, haven’t I, to say without impertinence that her manners are quite charming?’

‘And even if she is young,’ pursued the mother, looking gratified, ‘he is twelve years older. Old enough to look after her properly.’

‘A sensible age,’ said the old lady tranquilly. ‘Just the age for settling down. And quite time, too! In fact Marian was getting rather anxious. Poor Marian! Always so conscientious! So determined that we are never to forget that John is the head of the family. She couldn’t have taken his position more seriously if he’d been her own son. Her feudal instincts are really amazing. And for some months she’s been greatly put about because she thought he wasn’t going to do his duty and take a wife; so this engagement is an immense relief to her. She has such a sense of responsibility, you know; I really believe she had persuaded herself that she was in some way to blame because he was evidently enjoying his bachelorhood. And lately I fancy she caught wind of an establishment which … but I expect I’m being indiscreet….’

She paused for a moment, to discover, perhaps, whether her reference had been news to her companion. It apparently was not, for Mrs Cocks made a little sound of assent. Mrs Gordon Clewer continued:

‘Ah, well! I daresay you’ve heard as much about that coil as I have. Marian was very funny about it. She won’t see when things are really best ignored.’

There was a short silence, and then Mrs Cocks said gravely: ‘I think John is very sensible, don’t you? I mean, I think he’ll make a sensible husband.’

‘Of course he will, my dear. Men of his type generally do. They marry late, very often, but then they choose well and carefully.’

‘I’m so glad you think so,’ exclaimed Mrs Cocks. ‘Not everyone upholds me on that point.’

And she glanced across the room at her husband who, seated beside Lady Clewer, was sleeping with painful obviousness. His faint objections to the match had been, for a day or two, an inconvenience to her. Mercifully they had soon wilted before her own overpowering common sense. She listened complacently to Lois, who was singing: ‘Glad did I live and gladly die!’ to an accompaniment of consecutive fifths. Mrs Cocks was not musical, but she had been to enough concerts to mistake the piece for Grieg. Lois was perfectly scarlet with pleasure as she set her right.

‘It seems that she composed the thing herself,’ observed the lady to her family on the way home. ‘She’s my friend for life.’

Varden woke up for a few minutes in order to make some strong remarks about the music they had been hearing. He spoke at unusual length and with extraordinary venom. Mrs Cocks defended Lois, maintaining that the evening would have been very much worse without her.

‘And you can’t have heard much, Varden,’ she added, ‘for you slept the whole evening.’

‘Not nearly as well as I could have wished.’

‘She looks nice playing,’ observed Agatha.

‘Yes. It’s a pity she has her mother’s little blue eyes. They don’t go well with that rather Jewish colouring. And that clumsy mouth! But she’s not bad looking. Personally I’m rather sorry for her. I expect she’s catching it now. At dinner I felt Lady Clewer was just saving it up until we’d gone. Didn’t she look fierce? For all the world like a wax doll in a tantrum.’

‘She was rather tempersome about James, too, I thought.’

‘Oh,’ cried Mrs Cocks, ‘weren’t you disappointed not to see James? I was. I’m dying to see how he has grown up. I remember him as a little boy, of course; about nine, I should think. When we stayed at Lyndon once. He was queer then, wasn’t he, Varden?’

‘I don’t recollect him, my dear.’

‘Well, we didn’t see much of him. But he came into the drawing-room one evening with the little girls. Cynthia was quite a baby; it was very soon before Sir John died. Lois was very nicely behaved – came and shook hands with us quite as she should. But nothing would induce James to look at us. He crawled away and hid himself under a sofa. Such an ugly little boy, too, with this enormous head and very gappy teeth. Children like that are always very slow getting their second teeth, I believe. It’s a great sign. She was so good with him, not apologizing particularly, you know, but just saying: “Oh, James is rather shy today, I’m afraid.” She really has been wonderful with him.’

It occurred to Agatha that the wisest course would have been to put James under some special training. But she did not say this, as she had no wish to criticize Lady Clewer if she could help it. Varden, however, said it for her.

‘Well, she thought it over,’ explained Mrs Cocks, ‘and felt that it would really be very cruel to send him away to school. He is so shy and sensitive, and at home they understand him and don’t tease him. She felt that his own mother would not turn him out. And, of course, after his father’s death she had all the responsibility for him.’

‘But surely there are specially trained governesses …’

‘Oh, but Miss Barrington has been so splendid! So patient! Lady Clewer was telling me about her the other day. She is really Cynthia’s governess, you know, but she has taken the greatest pains with James. She taught him to read after a fearful struggle. He would not fix his attention. And Lady Clewer hasn’t neglected the question of special training, I can assure you. She’s gone into all this manual training, which is so important where deficients are concerned. Getting him very good drawing lessons. She says he has quite a turn that way.’

Varden gave it up. His wife was evidently determined to see no flaws in Lady Clewer’s stepmotherhood. He went to sleep again and they finished their journey in an unaccustomed silence. It occurred to the bride, with a slight shock, that this was one of the last of their little family expeditions. Very soon she would travel back from parties alone with her husband. This was an odd idea, for she was hardly ever permitted to drive alone with John. It had only happened three times—each of them a most glowing adventure. She was sure she would never get used to the notion of being alone with him as a matter of course. She did not know that she wanted to get used to it. In a way, being engaged was probably nicer than being married. It was more exciting. She ascribed her faint reluctance to regret at parting with her parents. She was convinced that she would miss her mother dreadfully, but she could not manage to feel very strongly over the loss of her father. He never seemed quite like a real person, somehow, though he had given her pearls for a wedding present.

Struck by an unusual contrition, she kissed him goodnight very kindly in the hall before going up to bed. Varden looked a little surprised but had the presence of mind to pat her shoulder with a creditable appearance of tenderness.

‘Well, well, well!’ she heard him mutter. ‘That’s a very handsome young sprig you’ve got hold of. Very handsome! I shouldn’t wonder if it turned out quite a success.’

And he shuffled off to dream over books that smelt of dust, crouching all night beside his green-shaded lamp. He looked very withered and old, with his bent shoulders and sharp, yellow face. He was fumbling with the handle of his library door as she climbed the stairs; a strange, dim figure, centuries removed from her own vital youthfulness. She thought that years alone had flung this gulf between them; she could not guess that he was already sundered from his kind by the recognized shadow of approaching death. He knew that his days were short and looked at the rest of humanity as across the unbridgable abyss of the grave. There was not very much time, now, for this father and daughter to know each other better.

Arrived in the seclusion of her bedroom she sat down before a looking-glass and studied herself carefully for a few minutes. She decided happily that fatigue was not unbecoming to her; it merely invested her with an interesting pallor. To these meditations she was impelled by no personal vanity, but by a conscientious and painstaking sense of duty. It was with some difficulty that she had learnt to be concerned over her appearance; for she was naturally indifferent to it. Since her engagement, however, she had made real efforts, aware of the power of her loveliness over John.

Her cousin, Gerald Blair, who had loved her first, was different. He took very little account of her beauty; indeed she had reason to suppose that he scarcely regarded it at all. But then she had not seen him for two years; not since that undignified episode at Canverley Fair.

She felt herself beginning to blush and saw that the pale person in the glass had got quite pink. The memory of that afternoon was a constant humiliation to her, for she knew that she had been very vulgar. She had conducted herself as no lady should, and a most unladylike retribution had overtaken her. Instigated and abetted by her graceless cousin she had done a lot of low things; she rode in swing-boats, and sucked Dorchester Rock in long pink sticks, and, finally, insisted upon having a look at the Fat Lady. This sight, so unexpectedly horrid, had hastened her doom. She had felt a little sick, she remembered, as she entered the Fat Lady’s stuffy booth; its occupant had been a coup de grâce. Gerald, who was at that time a medical student, supported her manfully to a fairly private spot behind some caravans. To her gasping apologies he replied that he was used to much worse things in hospital.

Mrs Cocks took a stormy view of the event and was unappeased when the totally ineligible Gerald announced, with some show of penitence, that he and Agatha were engaged. He was promptly eliminated from the horizon and Agatha was sent to school in Paris, where she soon learnt to be ashamed of herself. But, in a mood of self-discipline, she had preserved a memento of her escapade, a wonderful photograph of the pair of them, taken, developed and framed, all in five minutes, by a machine on the fair ground. The proprietor merely had to pull a handle and the photograph came out in ‘Brooch, Locket or Tie Pin, As Suits Lady Or Gent, Price One Shilling.’ They had purchased one apiece upon entering the fair, which, as the shameless Gerald remarked, was a good thing, for they were in no condition to be photographed when they departed.

She thought of him now a little shyly. He was away in America, working with a friend in some very new kind of hospital. She wondered if he had forgotten all this; it would be most convenient if he had. Anyhow, when she met him again she would be married and very dignified. As the Lady of Lyndon she could surely manage to live down the past. Gerald would come to stay with them, and she would be extremely nice to him, but matronly. These speculations were interrupted by her mother who, entering briskly, demanded why she was not in bed.

‘I brought you home early especially in order that you might get your proper night’s rest. I don’t want you to be over-tired and in bad looks next week. Hurry up, dear!’

Agatha obediently began to hurry and her mother sat on the bed as if for conversation.

‘Not a bad man, Major Talbot, when you come to talk to him. But uncommonly little to say for himself. What is that mark on your shoulder, child? Is it a little spot? Come into the light and let me look! Oh, it’s only where a hook has rubbed you. Tell Andrews to sew it down. What was I saying? Oh, yes! About Mrs Gordon Clewer.’

‘You began about Major Talbot.’

‘Did I? Oh, well, I’d finished about him. Mrs Gordon Clewer said such nice things about you, my dear. I was so pleased. I felt I must tell you. For she’s not a person who likes people easily. She thinks your manners are so nice.’

Agatha shook herself free from the clinging softness of her clothes and strolled away to the wash-hand stand. At intervals, while she splashed the warm water into her face and over her ears, she heard fragments of her mother’s dissertation on good manners: ‘… the longer one lives the more one sees the importance … especially in marriage … at the bottom of all these horrid scandals and divorces … ill breeding, pure and simple, is nine-tenths of the trouble … among decent people such things really don’t occur….’

Mrs Cocks broke off suddenly to descant upon trousseau lingerie as Agatha slipped into a nightdress. She had, after all, countermanded those sets in embroidered lawn that Agatha had wanted. Silk was so much more serviceable. Agatha, reflecting that, once married, she could have as many lawn nightdresses as she pleased, assented and jumped into bed. Mrs Cocks continued gravely:

‘I expect you think all my remarks about manners and marriage are beside the point. Perhaps they are, now. You are in love for the time being and I daresay it’s all very nice. Of course, while that lasts it’s all plain sailing. And, my darling, I don’t see why it shouldn’t last, in your case. For a very long time, at all events. It’s such a suitable marriage. But, in case of accidents, a really well-mannered husband is a great stand-by. You’ll know what I mean someday, if you don’t now.’

She kissed her daughter and departed. Agatha was not at all disturbed by all this talk of love lasting or not lasting. It was unthinkable that John should cease to desire her while she remained beautiful. And, at eighteen, she could expect to be that for years and years. Thirty years at least, since she took after her mother. She would possess all the aids to beauty which wealth can supply. There would be no hardships to dim her fairness or slacken her hold on him. Nothing else could shatter love’s illusion save the dallying years. She could very tolerably endure the idea that at sixty his ardour might begin to cool a little. She herself would be forty-eight, and everyone has to get old sometime.

Then, as her mother had said, there would always be beautiful manners. These would perpetually adorn his passionate demands and her own guarded compliance. They would dignify the late season of love’s decay. This sentiment reminded her of something she had lately read. She turned to the shelf by her bed, where the carefully chosen books of her girlhood stood in well-dusted rows. Pulling out Mansfield Park, she sought through it for a passage dimly remembered. It was something, surely, said by Mary Crawford when she was congratulating her brother on his attachment to Fanny Price:

‘I know that a wife you loved would be the happiest of women; and that even when you ceased to love she would yet find in you the liberality and good breeding of a gentleman!’

3.

Three days later Agatha met James Clewer, the strange brother-in-law of whom she had heard so much. Her first impression was not pleasing, but she was very tired, having spent the afternoon with her mother at a dressmaker’s. There they encountered Lady Clewer and Lois, who was trying on a bridesmaid’s frock and looking very sulky. Agatha perceived that she did not like the dress at all, and seized a moment when the matrons were discussing shoes to whisper anxiously:

‘Do you like it?’

‘Quite,’ said Lois, without enthusiasm.

‘But you don’t! Please say! Is there anything you’d like altered?’

‘Not unless you altered the entire dress,’ burst out Lois. ‘It’s so … dull!’

‘Plain white is always rather nice, don’t you think?’

‘No, I don’t. It suits you, that style. But it makes me look like a mincing missie. And it’s so smug. Almost like a confirmation dress!’

‘We did think of orange sashes shot with gold and bouquets of orange-lilies to match. Do you think that would improve it?’

‘Why, yes! That would be original. If you’ll excuse me, I think pale pink carnations are frightfully ordinary for a bouquet. Why did you give up the idea?’

‘My mother … your … our mothers … decided, I think, that it would be unsuitable for the younger bridesmaids.’

‘Our mothers! It’s not their wedding!’

‘Isn’t it?’ Agatha’s eyes danced. ‘I’m not so sure. But … I’ll see what I can do.’

When she could gain her mother’s ear she asked politely:

‘We’ve quite decided, then, against the orange scarves and flowers?’

‘Yes, quite,’ said Mrs Cocks. ‘As Lady Clewer says, they will be much too conspicuous.’

‘It’s a pity you didn’t decide before your gown was ordered, Mother. You’re bound to have an orange-tawny bouquet with it and it will clash so with the pink and white bridesmaids.’

‘Oh, do you think it will?’ Mrs Cocks looked distressed. ‘How tiresome! In that case the bridesmaids must have orange bouquets.’

‘A little pointless without the sashes, don’t you think?’

‘The sash could always be taken off afterwards if Mam’selle wanted to wear plain white,’ put in the dressmaker, who was all for the more striking effect.

Lady Clewer’s face cleared and she conceded:

‘That is so. We can take it off after.’

‘Not if I know it,’ was the outspoken comment of the two young women.

They exchanged triumphant glances but said nothing until they were left together in the car while their mothers paid a short call, later in the afternoon. Lois dropped the slightly hostile manner which she had formerly adopted towards Agatha and said with confidential friendliness:

‘You managed that very well. Do you always get your own way like that?’

‘Very seldom. It’s too much trouble.’

‘I do hate my clothes. They are so disgustingly jeune fille. I wonder if I shall ever be allowed to choose my own things! It’s the limit! I’ve been out two years, and I’m less free than I was in the schoolroom. I’m chaperoned all over the place, and have to read Italian with Miss Barrington, and can’t buy so much as a pair of stockings for myself. Other girls aren’t treated like this; not so badly! You are two years younger than me and after next week you’ll be absolutely free and allowed to buy what clothes you please, just because you’re married. It’s simply silly.’

‘You must hurry up and get married too, Lois.’

‘How am I to get married I should like to know? There is literally no one. All the boys Mother makes me dance with are so stupid. I couldn’t marry anybody but a clever man that I had something in common with. And I’d never be allowed to, because clever men are nearly always poor. Anyhow, I’ve only met one man I could ever marry, and’—with a stifled giggle—‘I’m afraid he’s quite impossible. I don’t know what Mother would say if she knew I was in love with him.’

Agatha looked very much embarrassed.

‘Were you ever in love before you met John?’

‘No.’

There was a distinct chilliness in Agatha’s voice. She had been brought up to regard this sort of conversation as extremely ill-bred. Her courteous priggishness infuriated Lois, who would have given the world not to have giggled. After an uncomfortable pause Agatha made an attempt at conciliation. She said:

‘You’ll be allowed to come and stay with us at Lyndon, won’t you? I’ll invite entire house parties of clever men to meet you. I’ll have all the intellect of Oxford to tea every afternoon.’

Before so glorious a prospect Lois softened.

‘Oh, Agatha, that will be fun! Will you really? You may laugh, but you don’t know how much the idea of any sort of escape appeals to me. My mother is so much worse than yours, if you’ll excuse me saying so. She treats me sometimes as if I had no more sense than James.’

‘Do you know, I haven’t met James yet.’

‘Haven’t you? Well, you have got a treat coming! It’s a good thing you didn’t see him before you accepted John. It might have scared you off.’

‘You alarm me.’

‘I’m only preparing you. You know, Mother doesn’t see that she only makes him worse, the way she goes on.’

‘But how, Lois?’

‘Oh, well … though he’s so quiet he’s really very sensitive. And he minds frightfully when she treats him like a baby. He understands quite enough to feel the indignity. It’s that, more than anything, which makes him so shy. He’s got perfectly awful now. He won’t go anywhere. And he’s always worse if she’s there.’

‘But he was always shy, wasn’t he?’

‘Oh, yes. He never would go to parties or anything, even when he was a little boy. And when other children came to play with us he always hid. Sometimes he came with us to tea at the rectory, but that was the most he would do.’

‘Shyness grows on people so.’

‘Yes, I know. And he’s just terrified of meeting you. He’s been lectured so tremendously about being civil and saying the right thing. If you come back to tea with us today, you will see him.’

‘Am I to come back with you?’

‘John said we were to bring you because he will be in. Then he can take you home if your mother can’t come.’

‘A drive with John! A drive with John!’ sang Agatha’s heart.

Lois was saying:

‘If you do come, please be nice to James and help him out if he puts his foot in it. You know, I sort of understand him, as far as anyone can. We used to back each other up a good bit in the schoolroom days. And I know how much he minds things. She shouldn’t speak to him, in front of people, as if he wasn’t all there.’

‘But … frankly … is he?’

‘I suppose not, if it comes to the point. But he’s got more sense than she thinks.’

‘She’ here reappeared, having obtained leave to bring Agatha back to Eaton Square for tea. On the way there Agatha found the prospect of meeting James was quite unnerving her. She told herself that he could be no shyer than she was.

As they climbed the stairs a strange figure bolted suddenly from the drawing-room and made for the upper floor. Lady Clewer raised her voice to an unusually raucous pitch and bawled after the fugitive:

‘James! James! Where are you going? Come down and be introduced to your new sister!’

James hesitated, lurking in the obscurity beyond the turn of the stairs. Then he came down and followed them into the drawing-room.

Agatha had been prepared to find him strange looking, but he was a greater shock than she had expected. She immediately thought him the most hideous creature she had ever encountered. But, on a second glance, it struck her that there was not quite the vacuity she had feared to see. Those sad eyes were too observant, the lines of the young face too severe to suggest imbecility. His build was massive, though short, and very uncouth by reason of his stooping shoulders and the immense length of his arms. His head was rather too big and his large, pale face, with its prominent cheekbones, was unrelieved by the faintest suggestion of eyebrow. This was the more noticeable since his brow was spacious and heavily constructed, especially in the region immediately above his light, sorrowful eyes. Sparse sandy hair grew far back upon his splendid, thoughtful forehead. His expression was one of discomfort and terror.

He advanced, smiling nervously, and shook with enthusiasm the hand which she gave him. She was most anxious to be nice to him, but she could think of nothing to say. What sort of thing did he talk about? What remark on her part would penetrate that amazing skull and convey to him her cordial intentions? An awful little pause ensued. She was aware that the whole Clewer family were trembling with anxiety to see how she took him. At last she bethought herself to say that he must have disliked leaving the country at so lovely a time of year.

‘Lyndon is beautiful in June, isn’t it?’ she asked.

He took no notice of the question. He was plainly labouring with some form of utterance. From Lady Clewer’s prompting glances it was obvious that he had been coached beforehand in the civilities of the occasion.

‘I must congratulate you,’ he pronounced at length, ‘upon our approaching relationship.’

This, it seemed, was not quite right. He thought it over and then tried again:

‘It is a great pleasure to meet you.’ Then with, a sudden glibness: ‘John is a very lucky man. Indeed, we are all very lucky to have you in the family. We are quite pleased, I can assure you.’

This was obviously very nearly what he had been told to say. She thanked him gravely. But he did not appear to think that he had done his full duty, though he was visibly perspiring with the effort. He babbled on:

‘I wish you both every happiness. I … er … hope….’ He stuck for a moment and then got it triumphantly: ‘I hope the marriage will be blest….’

‘That will do, James!’ exclaimed Lady Clewer.

She spoke with a luckless promptitude which could emphasize the unfortunate phrase but never obliterate it. He took her words, however, as a literal intimation that his task had been performed to her satisfaction, and relapsed into smiling silence. Agatha, glancing from Lois’s crimson blush to John’s bland vacancy, had much ado not to laugh. It occurred to her that James was going to be very much more of a trial if the Clewers would insist upon taking him seriously. They were all ridiculously put out, and began discomposedly to hand plates of bread and butter and teacups to each other. Lady Clewer became vehement upon the beauties of a silver rose-bowl which the Lyndon tenants had presented to John. It would be so nice for large white roses; she did hope Agatha would use it constantly.

‘You like flowers, dear? Ah, you’ll enjoy the Lyndon roses. I am a great gardener myself.’

Marian had not always been a great gardener. She had acquired the taste, with others, upon her second marriage. As mistress of the well laid out Martin ‘pleasure grounds,’ she had never thought of admitting to a close acquaintance with her garden. That was the affair of the hirelings who tended it. At Lyndon, however, she realized that every lady in the country is a great gardener. The country dames who now called on her inquired tenderly after her herbaceous borders. They made nothing of asking each other for a root of this or that, which was apparently by way of being a compliment, though Marian thought it a very odd habit. She was a woman who could conform rapidly to any type, so she promptly provided herself with a large straw hat, leather gloves, and a pair of scissors. She took to spending her afternoons among the roses and learnt to talk of daphne cneorum, romneya, hepatica, arenaria, gaultheria and berberis darwiniae. She flung a few of these exotic names about the drawing-room now, and Agatha, duly impressed, wondered whether she, too, would be transmuted into a great gardener when she was established at Lyndon.

‘But I don’t like weeding,’ she confessed. ‘When I used to stay with my godmother in the country she used to make me weed. It was so hot and stoopy.’

‘Oh, weeding!’ Lady Clewer was amused. ‘I don’t do that, naturally.’

John began to laugh at the idea of his frail bride wrestling with docks and thistles. Cynthia looked a trifle disdainful. ‘We have some sort of an old woman to do that,’ she said.

‘Griselda Pyewacket,’ said James unexpectedly.

‘What?’

Everyone was startled.

‘Griselda Pyewacket. That’s her name.’

‘Really? I didn’t know,’ said Lady Clewer looking repressively at James. ‘I thought it was a little boy.’

‘It’s rather a nice name,’ said Agatha thoughtfully.

‘Isn’t it?’ agreed James. ‘Her husband was called Pyramus Pyewacket. There was a little boy. He was her grandson. But he couldn’t weed because he got a whitlow on his thumb.’

‘Indeed! Just hand me Agatha’s cup, please, James!’

He rose with anxious alacrity, became entangled with the cake-stand and scattered several platefuls of macaroons and cress sandwiches over the floor. Agatha was very sorry for his discomfiture; she longed to laugh and help him to pick up the fragments. But under Lady Clewer’s uneasy glances she dared not. A bell was rung and they sat uncomfortably ignoring the food at their feet until menials had come and removed it.

The meal wore on and Agatha was glad to escape early. The strain of the afternoon, following upon the fatigues of the dressmaker, had almost overpowered her. As she took her leave she was aware of John’s hardly repressed impatience. She knew that he had joined them at tea merely in order to earn the brief bliss of escorting her home. It was a prospect which had sustained them both. Knowing this she became more punctiliously deliberate in her parting civilities, a reaction which her lover perfectly understood and which moved him to a restive approval.

‘Are you sure,’ said he, when they were at last in their taxi, ‘are you sure that this fellow isn’t taking the corners too quickly? You are looking quite pale! Let me tell him to go slower.’

‘No, thank you!’ she said, in some surprise. ‘I don’t call this fast. There is no traffic.’

‘Personally I don’t like this pace at all,’ he said gravely.

He seized the speaking tube and gave an order, whereupon the fellow not only crawled but adopted a strangely circuitous route.

‘Well, and what do you make of old James?’ he asked.

‘Oh, I was so sorry for him. It’s always difficult to congratulate a bride-elect, even for a person who isn’t shy.’

‘I know. One’s tendency is to be too much surprised, which isn’t really complimentary. And he always has had a knack of saying exactly the wrong thing, don’t you know.’

He slid a glance at her where she sat, withdrawn and tranquil in her corner of the car. She met his eyes with candid gravity and asked:

‘Do you think he will live at Lyndon in the future?’

‘Not unless you want him, darling. But as a matter of fact I don’t know at all what’s to be done with him unless he does. I should think he’ll always have to be with people who will keep an eye on him. But enough of James! He’s no topic for a tête à tête, do you think, Agatha?’

The fond pair passed to points of greater interest to them, conversing always with sufficient decorum but never without a disturbing suggestion, on his part, of ardour temporarily restrained. As they crept into Agatha’s street, however, she reverted to James:

‘He seems to be very good-tempered,’ she said.

‘Oh, yes, quite. In a way. He’s perfectly harmless. I don’t think he’ll give us any real trouble. I take it he’ll fall in with any plans we make for him. He’s got no particular views of his own, you see.’

4.

John was mistaken. In after life it seemed to Agatha that the whole of her wedding day had been filled with commotions about James and his inconvenient, unexpected views. It was entirely typical of him that he should have seized such a moment to launch them on his family. Wind of the trouble came to South Kensington the night before the wedding, when a note from Lois was brought in to Agatha:

‘My mother forgot to say to yours that a large slice of wedding cake and a photograph of you and John ought to be sent to:

Mrs Job Kell,

Old Forge Cottage,

Little Baverstock,

Tiverton.

She’s a superannuated housekeeper or something, who ran Lyndon in the interval between John’s mother and mine, and J. is the apple of her eye. Incidentally, I may add that James is even more of an apple, she having “reared him from a babby”, when even his own nurse had given him up. Indeed, she will never admit that there is anything the matter with him! Fact!!!

Apropos of James, we are all in such a way about him. Nothing very unusual in that, you’ll say; but wait till you hear! This is something quite new and too appallingly funny and unexpected. He has got the most extraordinary idea in the world into his head. I, for one, sympathize with him entirely. But, then, you know I often do. No time to tell you now, but I will tomorrow if I get the chance….

(Almost) your affectionate sister,

Lois.’

Agatha showed this letter to her mother, who was interested and perplexed.

‘I do hope he hasn’t had any kind of a fit,’ she said. ‘But anyway, it’s better today than tomorrow.’

‘Lois says an extraordinary idea. That doesn’t sound like an illness of any kind.’

‘Oh, dear!’ complained Mrs Cocks. ‘They have James on the brain. You mustn’t catch the habit when you are one of the family.’

‘He’s rather dreadful, but I think he’s much nicer when he isn’t trying to conform to their ideals of good manners. When he is on his best behaviour he is so painfully nervous and makes such dreadful faces that it’s almost unendurable. When he’s left to himself he isn’t at all bad. He has a wonderful smile, when he’s really smiling and not grinning. I must say I don’t think Lady Clewer does very well with him.’

‘You are the first person I’ve met who thought so. I remember when Sir John died everyone used to say: “Poor Lady Clewer! So good and kind, and so nice to that peculiar little stepson! She’s quite broken-hearted.” It was almost a catchword.’

‘But he isn’t little any more,’ argued Agatha. ‘That is where she is mistaken. I should like very much to know what Gerald would make of him.’

She said this with a splendid detachment. If she could not mention Gerald on the eve of her marriage with John, when could she? Mrs Cocks, not to be outdone, took this once dangerous name with the utmost calm. She replied easily:

‘I thought Gerald was studying nerves rather than mental cases. Hasn’t he gone to America especially to study nerves?’

‘Yes. But Aunt Hilda says that his next move will be to Paris to work in a clinic for mentally deficient children.’

‘Of course,’ said Mrs Cocks, ‘all this special study must be very interesting, and will get him a better position in the end, I suppose. But he seems to be taking a very long time about it. I never knew a young man so slow in getting started. It’s a pity, in a way, that he has independent means. What he has isn’t enough to be any good, though it’s enough for him just to live on. He might have done better if he’d had to support himself.’

Agatha, who knew that having ‘enough to be any good’ was a periphrasis for matrimonial eligibility, was moved to protest:

‘But specialists are badly needed. And it’s seldom possible for a man to specialize who hasn’t got private means.’

‘I know, dear. But I feel he might have done better for himself in another career. But perhaps America may do him good. He may acquire a more commercial spirit.’

Agatha tried to think of Gerald with a more commercial spirit. She was unable. Instead she stumbled dismayingly upon a vivid recollection of his old self—of the friend whose love she had once accepted. She thought of his quick, clever hands, the nervous composure of his gestures, and remembered how eagerly and brilliantly he had talked. She saw afresh his incongruities, his storms and indecisions, and recalled the tenderness which they had awakened in her.

And, remembering this, she was invaded by a tide of devastating, insupportable sorrow. To ease herself she rose and moved about the room, tormented by an anguish so sharp, so sudden, that she almost groaned aloud. Mrs Cocks, placid and handsome upon the sofa, continued her friendly conversation:

‘You don’t realize your luck, child, living in an age when girls are sensibly brought up.’

‘Don’t I?’ asked Agatha inattentively.

‘Oh, my dear! If you only knew what one used to have to put up with. I remember the night before I was married I had a most gruesome interview with my old step-aunt, my mother being dead. She came into my room, just when I was getting sleepy, and said the most upsetting things. It was done in her day. Fortunately she said nothing which I did not expect. Girls weren’t such fools as they were supposed to be, even in those days. And I wasn’t so very young, either. But it was all most disagreeable and you can’t think how I resented it. What’s the matter? Have you got toothache?’

‘No.’

Agatha had almost subdued her trouble and sat down by her mother, saying:

‘I can quite imagine how you resented it. You’d find me very chilly, Mother dear, if you tried any treatment of the kind on me.’

‘But you have got toothache! You are perfectly green!’

‘I had just one sharp stab, but it’s gone now.’

It had. But she was feeling strangely exhausted.

‘You’d better go to bed. If you look like this tomorrow I shall go distracted. As stony as a gorgon!’

‘The gorgons weren’t stony. It was the other people …’

‘They were very plain, and so are you at the moment. But, apropos of what I was saying of my step-aunt, there is nothing I ought to say to you, is there?’

‘Nothing, thank you!’ replied Agatha hastily. ‘You’ve given me solid good advice for the last six weeks. I couldn’t absorb any more,’

‘That is so,’ agreed Mrs Cocks placidly. ‘But I wouldn’t like to feel I hadn’t done my duty by you.’

To the bride the future yawned like a precipice almost at her feet. Light cast by her mother’s experience upon the abyss could but disincline her for the inevitable plunge. She clung rather to the reflection that, by every standard known in her world, she was marrying a man whom she loved. The plunge ought not, in these circumstances, to turn out so very bad.

Mrs Cocks kissed her tenderly and bade her good-night. ‘I shall let you sleep late tomorrow,’ she said, ‘and you shall have your breakfast before you get up. Come to me if you have any return of that toothache in the night, and I’ll give you something for it.’

Then, with a recollection of the sentiment due to such a moment:

‘Have you said good-night to your father?’

Agatha shook her head.

‘I don’t think I’d better. I never do. And it might disturb him.’

‘Perhaps it would look rather silly.’

‘After dinner I played that Scarlatti he likes. I thought it would be rather touching on my last night at home. But he went away in the middle.’

‘Did he? Oh, well….’

The underground trains, passing the end of the garden, punctuated the night with their intermittent rumbling. Agatha lay awake listening to them and awaiting repose. Her feverish fatigue held sleep away from her and she was still frightened and shaken by that violent, intolerable pang which had rent her when she thought of Gerald Blair.

It was terrible, to know that her heart still concealed such weapons, for she was almost certain, now, that she had never loved her cousin. His wooing, though it had moved her at the time, had been a boyish, inexperienced affair. It was John who had roused her to the possibilities of emotion; from him she had learnt the subtleties of guarded speech, the contagious fire which can lie hidden in a glance. For him her heart beat quicker.

She had never known any of these things before. Gerald had been no more than a friend; but a friend in whose company she had found, inexplicably, perfect happiness. It was not for him but for the memory of this contentment that regret assailed her. She believed that she yearned after a mental completeness, once captured and then lost for ever. There had been an intensity of sensation, a full current of life transcending the sorry measure of normal existence. For a little time she had perceived creation as a unity. It had been this abounding of the spirit, this marvellous clarity of mood, this apprehension of profound significance in everything, which had driven her to her career of folly at Canverley Fair. She had escaped, for a moment, from the isolation which binds us; she was no longer a detached figure upon an unfocussed background, but part of a gay and simple pattern.

This exaltation had vanished soon enough, but the memory could still hurt her when she thought of it, or when she thought of Gerald who had shared it with her. She knew that she could never hope to find it again in the conscious, deliberate life upon which she was embarking.

For her consolation, in this endless oppressive night, she turned to the image of her lover. But he evaded her; he was blurred by the mists of romance. She wanted to see him sharply and clearly, as she had seen her cousin, but she could only recall, vaguely, the brief ecstasy of her interviews with him. She began, in despair, to catalogue his qualities; he was dark, he was prosperous, he was experienced and determined. Everything, in fact, that poor Gerald was not.

At last, when London sparrows chirped to the dawn in the plane trees and milk carts rattled in the street below, she fell asleep, to dream neither of John nor of Gerald, but of the frightening, mysterious James. He pursued her through countless, shifting scenes, led her to the altar, and climbed snowy mountains with her. They were lost in the endless glare of blinding glaciers. And when, still in her dream, she rose and leant from her window for air, his large face grinned up at her from a menacing street, all empty and heavy with a strange grey dawn. The vision so terrified her that she could not shake off the horror of it when she woke. The day took on the vague, poignant qualities of a nightmare in which nothing seemed real save the sense of impending doom. She did what she was told, listened to her mother’s rapid, authoritative voice, ate an intolerable number of small meals brought to her on trays, and submitted to an excited toilet. The silence in which she drove with her father to church was lovely and comforting.

John, handsome and competent as ever, waited for her at the chancel steps, and at the sight of his cheerful self-possession she became more collected. While the clergyman was haranguing them about those carnal lusts of which the bride is supposed to know nothing, she reflected composedly that John ought really to be married as often as possible, he did it so well. He was obviously enjoying himself. She was aware that he had deliberately removed his thoughts from her in order to be able to concentrate on his part. This was the right way to do it; being married was, after all, a duty to one’s neighbour and not a personal affair. Fired by his high standard of social exertion she threw herself into the business with energy and gave a very pleasing and stately performance. By the unusual stillness of the church behind them she divined that they were getting it across. As she returned down the aisle Mendelssohn’s triumph seemed to epitomize her own satisfaction in her beautiful behaviour. She had quitted the maiden state becomingly.

They were no sooner bestowed in the car than John burst out: ‘Have you heard about James?’

‘Not in any detail. Lois said there was trouble in a note last night. But she didn’t say what it was.’

‘It’s the most extraordinary affair. Desperately annoying, just when we are going away. They’ll have to settle it without us, that’s all. We can’t be bothered.’

‘But what’s the matter with him?’

‘It’s unheard of! The fellow wants to go to Paris. Says he is going, in fact.’

‘Paris! Paris!’

‘Yes. Paris, my child!’

‘But … oh … why?’

‘Heaven knows! To work at his painting, he says. He has quite an obsession for that kind of thing, you know. He always had, even when he was a kid.’

‘But does he want to be an artist?’

‘God knows what he wants! He seems to have got the idea from someone who’s been teaching him drawing. It would be funny if it wasn’t so idiotic. James going to Paris! Good lord!’

‘But does he draw well? How well does he draw?’

‘Not so badly. He caricatures rather well.’ There was an irritable reminiscence in John’s tone. ‘Mamma got him jolly good lessons, when she saw he was keen on it. I believe it’s not uncommon for that sort of chap to have a purely mechanical turn of the kind, don’t you know. But it’s not as if anyone was stopping him from doing it here. He can do it all day for all we care. We don’t interfere with him.’

‘Poor James!’

‘Poor James, does she say? Poor James be … well, perhaps I’d better not say it till I’ve been married a little longer. It would be rather shocking on one’s wedding journey. But, do you know, Agatha, we can’t really stop him going if he wants to. It sounds incredible, but there it is. He’s of age, and he has a small independent income, inherited from our mother. Of course, we’ve always taken it for granted that he’ll be guided by us. But now …’

‘Surely you can do something?’

‘Oh, if the worse comes to the worst, we could, I imagine, get a doctor’s certificate or something. But it would be very awkward. We ought to have done it before. You see he can behave so sensibly when he likes; and if, just to spite us, he showed up at his best with the doctor, we might have quite a job to get him certified. Still, he can’t be allowed to go.’

‘Would it really be impossible if he wants to very much?’

‘Why just think of it! James in Paris! A place like Paris!’

‘It isn’t so different from any other place.’

‘No, but he is different from any other person. There’s no knowing what mischief he mightn’t get up to. It all comes from taking this scrubbing and daubing too seriously. I was against it from the first. But Mamma had all these ideas about manual education. However! I’ve told him I won’t sanction it. As head of the family I’ve put my foot down. And he needn’t think I’ll help him if he gets into difficulties.’

‘What did he say to that?’

‘Nothing. He’s as obstinate as a mule…. Hullo! Here we are!’

They had drawn up before the Cocks’s door, triumphant with its gala awning and crimson carpet. It was flung wide by beaming maidservants and John handed Agatha and her lilies, her pearls, her satin train and lace veil, out of the car. In the hall the bride dispensed a little of her mild sweetness to her father’s servants. She was already rather tired of hearing her new name. She had been called Lady Clewer a hundred times in the vestry while she signed herself, for the last time, as Agatha Cocks. But she submitted smilingly and had pleased, happy glances for everyone.

John began to grow impatient. He liked watching his wife do the right thing, but he was unwilling that she should waste too much time among sooty cook-maids. She knew that he was fidgeting on the stairs behind her, and turned to join him. They had scarcely reached the drawing-room before other taxis were heard outside and there were voices in the hall. John twitched her train into becoming folds round her feet and assumed the posture of happy groom at her side. She felt that she quite hated James for spoiling the romance of her wedding drive. It was the first expedition she had ever made with John that had no flavour of adventure. They had been all absorbed in domestic discussion. It was very disappointing, for they could never be married again. This unique occasion was gone—lost!

‘I’ve not crushed your flowers,’ he murmured in her ear as a bevy of bridesmaids flocked into the room. ‘Isn’t that exemplary in a bridegroom?’

This interesting point was immediately marked by the youngest of the Clewers. There was only one quality which Cynthia found admirable in her sister-in-law, and that was her exquisite neatness. Mrs Cocks also recorded with pleasure the immaculate freshness of Agatha’s lilies, and added another mark to John’s credit. She might have known he would take care; there never was a man who knew better what was expected of him in a public position.

The outer world poured in, flooding the house of Cocks with a jubilant tide. Agatha gave herself to the embraces of countless women and heard them congratulating her mother upon getting rid of her. In the midst of all this clamour the sight of the troublesome James advancing to greet her had a calming effect. She decided that his new ambitions became him, however impossible they might be in themselves. He wore a look of sulky obstinacy which was a great improvement upon his earlier manner. His very walk was more purposeful. He shook hands with her and scowled at John. Cynthia, however, who had followed him, was determined to exhibit him a little.

‘Why don’t you kiss her, James?’ she drawled. ‘You ought to. She’s your sister now, you know.’

He remained cool.

‘I’d better not,’ he said to Agatha. ‘You wouldn’t like it and I shouldn’t like it.’

‘Oh, what a gentleman!’ mocked Cynthia. ‘You’ll have to learn better manners before you go to France. Did you know James was going to France, Agatha?’

‘I had heard something of it.’

‘Did John tell you about it in the car coming back from church?’ demanded James with interest.

‘Er … yes.’

‘There, then!’ He nodded at Cynthia, and explained: ‘She wondered what you would talk about. I said it would be me.’

‘You do think a lot of yourself, don’t you?’ retorted she. ‘He’ll have to hurry up and learn French, won’t he?’

‘I know French,’ he asserted.

This was true, for he had shared several French governesses with Lois and Cynthia and had become quite as articulate in the tongue of these poor ladies as in his own.

‘It doesn’t make much difference,’ said Cynthia, tired of baiting him. ‘John says you aren’t to go, so you won’t be allowed to.’

They all looked at John, who was ably defending himself against the congratulations of an hysterical old lady.

‘I don’t mind what John says.’

‘He’ll have to mind, won’t he, Agatha?’

‘I really don’t know what will be settled,’ replied Agatha coldly.

She disliked Cynthia.

James turned away to one of the windows where he spent the remainder of the reception absorbed in the constant arrival and departure of taxis in the street below. Agatha noticed that the other window was occupied by another solitary watcher—her father. He was looking extremely small and shrunken and was making no attempt to fulfil his duties as a host. The isolated bleakness of these two figures, withdrawn amidst the babble, struck her strangely. They brooded in the background like skeletons at the feast.

An hour later, when she came downstairs erect and slim in her blue travelling suit, she glanced into the drawing-room to see if they were still there. Varden Cocks was gone, but James was at his post. Sunlight and emptiness filled the room, and a great clamour of conversation, an enormous rattling of spoons and forks in the dining-room below proclaimed the whereabouts of the wedding guests. Anew she felt most anxious to be nice to poor James; to bring balm to that lonely, mutilated mind. She felt indignant with the Clewers for scorning him. It was as if they were all determined to deny to him that dignity and self-respect which is the birthright of the lowest. His sorrowful eyes turned upon her were an accusation.

She advanced into the room.

‘They are all downstairs eating ices,’ he told her.

‘I know. Aren’t you coming?’

‘No! I don’t like them.’

‘Well, James, it’s good-bye for the present, then. You’ll come and pay us a long visit, won’t you, when we get back from Norway.’

‘I shall be in Paris then,’ he stated.

Without conscious readjustment she began to accept his point of view. Of course he would be in Paris. How stupid they all were!

‘We may be stopping in Paris before the end of our honeymoon,’ she said. ‘If you are there, we must meet and go about to things.’

‘What things?’

‘Oh … theatres and things.’

‘But I’m going to paint,’ he objected,

‘But you don’t want to paint all the time, surely? You’ll go round and see the sights, I suppose?’

He thought it over and then said conclusively:

‘I don’t here.’

She felt baffled and wondered what else she could say. There were fresh sounds of a car in the street and he looked out of the window.

‘It’s yours,’ he said. ‘They are putting your luggage on to it.’

Agatha yawned.

‘What are you yawning for?’ he asked sympathetically.

‘I don’t know. I keep on doing it. It’s silly. I can’t help it.’

‘I know,’ he averred.

There were cries for her downstairs, and she thought she heard John’s voice. She stood still, gaping. James, surprised at her rigidity, looked into her face exclaiming:

‘Here! What are you frightened of?’

Turning to rebuff his foolishness, she was silenced by his expression. In that ugly countenance she perceived so much gravity, indignation and concern that she was mute.

‘Look … You woman … Agatha …’ he said urgently, ‘… don’t go if you don’t want to!’

‘Agatha! Are you ready? Agatha!’

People were coming upstairs.

‘Don’t listen to them,’ muttered James, catching her arm. ‘I don’t. They are very silly, you know. You shouldn’t let them …’

A shrill laugh wrenched itself out of her throat. She shook off his hand and admonished him:

‘Don’t talk like that! It’s you who are silly, James!’

For a moment he stood as if barring her way. Then the horrified penetration died out of his eyes and he let her go, indifferently. She ran down to her husband.

5.

Marian Clewer prided herself upon the regularity with which she conducted her household. There was no variation in her iron laws. Immediately after the wedding, therefore, she flogged her family back into the routine of everyday life, sternly checking any attempt to prolong the feast. Upon the return of the Clewers to Eaton Square she demanded whether Lois had read Italian with Miss Barrington. Lois, who resented her Italian lessons more deeply than any of her other shackles, replied sulkily that she had not. She had supposed that John’s wedding would be a holiday.

‘That has nothing to do with it,’ replied Lady Clewer coldly. ‘Go and take off your frock and give it to Peters to put away for you. Put on your green dress and go into the schoolroom for your reading. You can have your tea there today as I want to talk business with Major Talbot and Mrs Cocks.’

The schoolroom was a nice sunny place at the top of the house, well equipped with all the paraphernalia of modern education. Miss Barrington, the notable woman who had succeeded in teaching James to read, was sitting comfortably in a rocking-chair by the window. She also had hoped for a holiday and was engaged upon one of those endless letters to her cousins at Cape Town which occupied her infrequent leisure hours. But when she saw Lois she sprang to her feet with an eager display of activity such as Marian liked to see in her subordinates. She was a sensible, apple-cheeked young woman, with high academic qualifications, a morbid conscience, and great personal humility: an ideal governess for the Clewer household. She belonged to that type of energetic worker for which Marian had a positive cult. There were squads of them down at Lyndon; secretaries, lady gardeners, dairy-women and the like. Lady Clewer was uniformly generous to them, bullied them, nursed them when they were ill, paid for their false teeth, kept them continually on the run in her employ, and, in short, scarcely allowed them to call their souls their own. All that she required in return was loyalty.

Miss Barrington was very loyal. She even thought it necessary to display enthusiasm over the mild pages of I Promessi Sposi, which book it was her duty to read with Miss Martin. She said sometimes that she thought it an interesting story. She looked very unhappy when Lois exclaimed:

‘I suppose it’s because Mother can’t even speak her own language properly that she thinks I ought to know four!’

‘She has a very high ideal of education,’ said the governess.

‘Most people idealize what they haven’t got.’

‘Lois!’

‘Well? I was only generalizing. Where’s the wretched book? Let’s get it over!’

‘Lois! You know quite well that you oughtn’t to talk like that.’

‘I can’t help it. It’s too irritating. Here’s Agatha, two years younger than me, allowed to go to Norway with a strange man she hardly knows….’

‘Let me see! Where did we leave off?’ said Miss Barrington hastily.

‘I don’t want to be married, goodness knows,’ stormed Lois. ‘Except to get a little peace and freedom and quietness. But I never shall, anyway. I never get the chance. I never see any man to speak to.’

‘You go to balls and things. You’ve been presented,’ put in Cynthia from the sofa.

‘What earthly good does being presented do? I’m not going to marry the Prince of Wales. And as for dances, Mother scares away any man who attempts to be at all friendly. I never get the chances other girls do.’

‘Lois! I’ve found the place!’

‘Well, why didn’t you marry John?’ asked Cynthia. ‘I should have, in your position. You could, you know. You aren’t really related. And you’ve had plenty of opportunities.’

Lois, to whom this was a new idea, gasped. So did Miss Barrington.

‘Well, but … John didn’t want to marry me….’

‘That’s your fault. You could have made him…. I think you missed an excellent chance. Just think what fun it would have been taking Lyndon out of Mother’s hands!’

‘Cynthia! I can’t have you talking like that. It isn’t very nice,’ exclaimed the agonized Miss Barrington.

The two girls laughed.

‘How do you mean, I could have made him …?’ pursued Lois.

‘Oh, well! If you don’t know that much!’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. You couldn’t, at your age. Why, you’ve not even been confirmed!’

‘I don’t see what that has to do with it.’

‘It shows what a baby you are.’

Cynthia needed occasional repression, but it seldom had any effect on her. She smiled mysteriously and examined the ends of her finger-nails.

‘Well, all things considered,’ she said, ‘I think I’ll get married before I come out.’

‘Nonsense! You won’t be allowed to. Nobody does.’

‘Well, I expect I shall. You see! As for you…. There’s still James. You’d better take him.’

James, seated at the table, was drawing in a small sketch-book. He was, as usual, absorbed in his work, and did not look up when his name was mentioned. Lois could not avoid an expressive grimace at the idea of marrying him.

‘Lois and Cynthia! You really mustn’t talk in this way. Not in the schoolroom. Cynthia, get something to do! Your mother thinks you are too indolent. It’s nonsense to lie on the sofa doing nothing in the middle of the afternoon.’

‘I’m not doing nothing. I’m polishing my nails.’

‘Lois! Hadn’t you better get on with your Italian?’

The two girls took no notice and calmly continued their argument. Under the eye of their mother they were civil to their governess, but not otherwise. They had, naturally, no idea of obligatory courtesy towards dependants. Marian’s own demeanour to her subordinates, for all her benevolence and generosity, was not calculated to instil such a principle into their budding minds. Lois, who prided herself upon her interest in James’s work, leant over his shoulder to inspect the drawing. It was, she perceived, a pencil study of the Cocks family, presented with the unpleasing bleakness of outline peculiar to James. Mrs Cocks, seated in a magnificent amplitude, more than suggested Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse. Behind her chair hovered two shadowy creatures, types of death and despair. Executed by anyone else, the intention of the piece must have been deliberately malicious. But Lois, from long experience, had come to believe that James was incapable of malice. He had too little grasp of situation; too little comprehension of human character. Sketches which looked like caricatures were, for him, a simple exposition of the subject as he saw it.

‘I like the way you’ve put Mr Cocks and Agatha in the background,’ she commented. ‘But you’ve made them too tragic. Agatha does look a little triste sometimes, but in quite a placid way. She never has that crucified sort of look. And Mr Cocks may be ill, but he isn’t dying.’

‘Isn’t he?’ asked James.

‘Not that I know of.’ Lois began to wonder why she had been so sure about it. ‘It may be because his wife looks so lively,’ she concluded. ‘What a splendid creature she is! And just like Mrs Siddons. I love it when she piles up all her hair on that coronet comb. You’ve done it justice, James!’

‘You’d better show it to her,’ advised Cynthia. ‘It may make her speak for you this afternoon.’

‘What’s that?’ exclaimed Lois.

‘Well, she’s having tea in the drawing-room this minute with Major Talbot and Aunt Edith. That’s why you aren’t allowed there. They are settling what’s to be done with James.’

‘But how do you know?’

‘She listened at the door,’ James asserted.

Miss Barrington exclaimed, but Cynthia only laughed. Lois became impassioned:

‘Oh, isn’t it too bad? They’ve no right to do it. No right at all. When you aren’t there! As if you were a child!’

‘It makes no difference,’ said James calmly.

‘But suppose they say you aren’t to go?’

‘Well, they can. I shall go all the same.’

‘It’s doing it behind your back which is so disgusting. They ought to let you speak for yourself.’

‘James isn’t much of a speaker,’ observed Cynthia. ‘Why don’t you do it for him?’

‘I’ve a good mind to. Shall I, James?’

‘You can if you like,’ agreed James absently, as he returned to his drawing.

Lois bounced out of the room and burst like a whirlwind upon the astonished party in the drawing-room.

‘It’s very unfair of you to decide about James without consulting him,’ she stormed. ‘Why should you insult him like that? If you don’t take care he’ll go just to spite you.’

Lady Clewer became crimson.

‘I never heard such a thing in my life!’ she cried. ‘Considering that for sixteen years I’ve done nothing but study his welfare….’

‘You don’t study his feelings….’

‘Will you hold your tongue, Lois?’

‘You’ve no right to discuss him when he can’t speak for himself!’

‘How did you know we were discussing him, my dear?’

The high drawl of Mrs Gordon Clewer cut into the dispute with deadly power. The shrill, angry tones of the mother and daughter subsided. Marian had been so furious that she had overlooked this obvious retort. She now proceeded to make use of it, in her own thorough way, speaking about an octave lower.

‘Yes! You young people think yourselves so important, don’t you? You can’t imagine that we ever have anything else to discuss, can you? But, my dear Lois, when we do discuss James we shan’t ask your advice. We may summon him, but we won’t need to consult you. Have you finished your Italian reading?’

‘No.’

‘Well, then, pray go and do so.’

‘All the same,’ exploded Major Talbot, when Lois had retired in disorder, ‘something’s got to be done about the lad, I suppose.’

He spoke so seldom that the three ladies jumped.

‘We’d better settle it, one way or the other,’ he went on. ‘How, exactly, do you stand, Lady Clewer? I mean, how much legal control have you over his movements?’

‘That’s the difficulty. He’s of age: twenty-one three weeks ago. He seems to have had this extraordinary plan for two years. But he kept it to himself because he had got it into his head that he could do as he liked as soon as he was twenty-one. I don’t know who can have told him that.’

‘Then this isn’t a new idea, this Paris scheme?’

‘It’s the first we’ve heard of it. But he says that he always meant to go when he was twenty-one. It’s been very deceitful of him. And then he has this money of your sister’s. About £400 a year, doesn’t it come to?’

‘But have you … er … no medical certificate?’

‘No. Nothing that really quite justifies …’

‘When did he last see a doctor?’

‘When he was about fifteen, I think,’ said Marian, after reflection. ‘They all had measles and I suppose he saw one then.’

‘He hasn’t been having special medical treatment?’ asked Mrs Cocks in surprise.

‘There was no call for it. Physically he was always very strong and healthy. I took him to a specialist when he was very little, of course. He said that the child was very abnormal.’

‘Quite!’ said Major Talbot judicially. ‘And I suppose from time to time some qualified doctor has had a look at him?’

‘N-no. Where was the use?’ said Lady Clewer in distress. ‘So little can be done for that sort of thing when once you’ve accepted it.’

‘D’ye mean to say you’ve never definitely established what’s wrong with the boy?’ cried Major Talbot.

‘Really!’ Marian became flustered. ‘I should have thought it was obvious to anyone looking at him. It always has been. Directly, the first time I saw him, I guessed that there was something very wrong. But, of course, I never foresaw that he would get these foolish ideas into his head, or I would have been more careful to get the whole thing cut and dried before he came of age. Only I shrank from it. Having these things in the family is so awkward. It’s so painful! I’m not accustomed to it.’

‘Poor Marian!’ murmured Mrs Gordon Clewer.

‘Of course, if you think I’ve been mistaken, I’ve no more to say. I acted for the best, as I thought. It hasn’t been easy; I don’t expect you can realize what a difficulty it’s been. He didn’t even learn to read properly till he was past sixteen. It’s been impossible to teach him civil manners. We couldn’t send him to an ordinary school, or even let him be very much with other children.’

‘Oh, quite! Quite! Quite!’ soothed Major Talbot, who was overwhelmed by this flow of rhetoric.

‘I kept him at home with my girls. It’s often been a little trying for them. But I thought he would be happier. If you think he should have been sent to some institution, I’ve nothing more to …’

‘Oh, no, indeed!’ protested Major Talbot. ‘I’m sure you did all that was best. It’s only the question of preventing him from making a fool of himself now. This idea of going to Paris! What’s to be done about it?’

‘Of course,’ suggested Mrs Cocks, ‘I suppose it would be better for him to have something to do? Something that really interests him, and gives him an object in life.’

‘Oh, yes! That’s why I have done everything in my power to encourage his drawing. But why Paris? Why not here?’

‘Well,’ said Mrs Gordon Clewer, ‘I think it might have been very much worse. It’s quite respectable to want to draw in Paris. He might have wanted to draw battleships and sections of salmon in crayon on the pavement.’

‘But Paris is such an impossible place.’

‘He’ll have to be looked after wherever he goes, won’t he?’ asked Mrs Cocks. ‘If you gave in on the essential point, and let him go, perhaps you could induce him to stay with people who would look after him a certain amount.’

‘Exactly, Mrs Cocks,’ exclaimed Major Talbot. ‘Exactly! I quite agree with you. It would be much easier to let him go, under proper supervision, than to get a medical certificate to prevent it. Doctors are uncommonly careful who they certify, you know, especially when there’s any money in the case.’

‘Then you all think I should let him go?’ asked Lady Clewer dubiously.

The general opinion seemed to be that James should go if a suitable establishment could be found for him. Presently an idea occurred to Lady Clewer.

‘Somebody now … who was it? … Somebody told me the other day of a family who takes paying guests. Young girls, generally, and there is a certain amount of chaperonage. An old lady and her daughters I think it was. I wonder if they would take a young man! And they were strict Protestants.’

‘French Protestants are always strict,’ said Mrs Gordon Clewer. ‘But it’s a point. We don’t want our James going over to Rome. If he did, he would undoubtedly want to become a Trappist monk, and I don’t know but what the vocation wouldn’t suit him.’

‘It was Mrs Temple told me,’ recollected Lady Clewer. ‘I was wondering if a little time in Paris wouldn’t be nice for Cynthia. But I rather gathered that these people were a little—’ bourgeois had been the word used by Mrs Temple, but Marian shied at it and substituted: ‘middle-class.’ ‘So I did not think it would quite do.’

‘It would be a pity for Cynthia’s tone to be contaminated,’ said Mrs Gordon Clewer sententiously.

‘Yes,’ agreed Cynthia’s mother. ‘She’s at such an impressionable age. I wouldn’t like to send her among second-rate people. But it would be different for James. Mrs Temple says they often have girls who are studying music or art, and they will take them about to their lessons. I daresay they would take James every day to the studio, or wherever it is he will work.’

‘But would that quite do, in this case?’ protested Mrs Cocks. ‘I mean, a young man can’t be escorted quite like a girl can. It puts him in such a ridiculous position.’

Mrs Gordon Clewer shot an amused look at Major Talbot, but he had evidently failed to find anything ludicrous in the prospect of James under daily escort to the Latin Quarter. Concealing her joy, she innocently remarked:

‘But in France, you know, Mrs Cocks, things are very different. You see quite big boys taken to school by bonnes in white aprons.’

Marian took this in perfectly good faith. She rejoined tranquilly:

‘Yes. France is quite different.’

‘But you can’t!’ Mrs Cocks was beginning to think that Agatha had been right. ‘The thing’s impossible! Can’t you see? You can’t treat the poor boy like that! It’s cruel! Think how he will be laughed at, taken about by a nursery maid!’

‘But,’ urged Marian, ‘he must have somebody to look after him.’

‘Well, then, don’t let him go at all. But don’t expose him to the universal derision of every boy of his own age!’

‘Don’t you see, Mrs Cocks,’ said Major Talbot, ‘it’s a rash step letting him go at all? It doesn’t alter the fact that he can’t look after himself. He must go under peculiar conditions.’

‘He can choose,’ said Marian. ‘He can go if he will accept the arrangements we make for him. If he doesn’t like them, he needn’t go. Of course,’ she conceded, ‘it needn’t be a nursery maid. No! That would look foolish. But there must be someone.’

Mrs Gordon Clewer rose, preparing to depart. She kissed Marian on both cheeks with the utmost affection.

‘Good-bye, my dear,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you’ve come to so satisfactory a conclusion. You are inimitable; you never disappoint me. But I’m very much afraid you are only at the beginning of your troubles. You’ll never find that he really settles down. Never! It’s heredity, my dear; environment is so much overrated. You’ve done what you can, I’m sure, but you’ll never alter his heredity. With those parents he is bound to give trouble….’

‘I never met his mother,’ said Marian in some surprise. ‘But from what I know of his parents, I should have thought …’

‘You knew neither of them, my dear,’ said the old lady unexpectedly.

Everyone felt that she must have forgotten that Marian had been married to James’s father for two years. Old age was beginning to tell upon Mrs Gordon Clewer. She sometimes said these odd, disconcerting things. She nodded thrice, very emphatically, clucked at them and ambled away under the attentive escort of Major Talbot.

Mrs Cocks took her leave, hoping that the unfortunate James would have the sense to give up the Paris idea. She underrated his tenacity. James never wasted energy over non-essentials. Provided that he might go to Paris and paint he agreed calmly to any arrangements his stepmother might like to make. Lois, however, felt for him all the indignation that was proper.

It was a fine evening, and Mrs Cocks walked most of the way to South Kensington. As she turned into her own street she saw a taxi drawn up before the awning and crimson carpet which still decorated her door. Upon the steps was a young man, talking to the parlourmaid. Before she could make out who he was, he ran down again, jumped into the taxi and drove off.

‘Who was that, Meadowes?’ she asked.

‘It was Mr Blair, Madam.’

‘Oh! I didn’t know he was in England. Did he want to see me?’

‘No, Madam. He asked for Miss Agatha. Lady Clewer, I mean. He said he’d only got back from America this morning. He didn’t seem to know that she had been married today.’

‘Oh. Did he say he’d come again?’

Mrs Cocks had no objection, now, to seeing her young kinsman about the house.

‘No, Madam. When he heard Miss Agatha was gone out of town on her honeymoon, he said he wouldn’t wait. He said he was just going to France.’

‘Oh! Oh, yes!’

‘If you please, Madam, Mr Cocks has gone to bed and sent for the doctor. I thought I’d better tell you at once.’

‘Gone to bed? I’d better go up. Thank you, Meadowes.’

As she climbed the stairs, Mrs Cocks reflected that her husband’s collapse was not very surprising. He had been looking ill all day, and she had meant to take him in hand as soon as the wedding was over.

This visit of Gerald’s was very odd, and just like him. An invitation to the wedding had been sent to him in America, in case he should return to England in time for it. But it must have missed him. On the whole, she was not sorry that it had. Agatha was now safe.

Mrs Cocks smiled a little grimly, remembering his hasty departure from her house along the crimson carpet spread for his successful rival.