CHAPTER I
The Pinsents never saw any reason why they shouldn’t be modern without--as they expressed it--going too far.
They didn’t believe in the sheltered-life system, but that was perhaps because they rather under-estimated their own idea of what constituted a shelter.
There were certain risks, of course, in allowing your daughters to play mixed hockey, smoke cigarettes and belong to a suffrage movement (they could attend meetings, but weren’t to throw stones). Still, it was strange how little harm these concessions to modernity had done the Pinsent girls.
Bernard Shaw rolled off them like water from a duck’s back.
Somewhere between the ages of fourteen and seventeen Mrs. Pinsent presented her daughters with an approximate definition of life. Agatha yawned and Edith said, “Oh, dear! We knew all that ages ago.” For a moment Mrs. Pinsent became agitated. Had they, in spite of the healthiness of their surroundings, come in contact with evil influences? But she was reassured when Agatha explained that they had picked it up from rabbits.
Rose, who was more sensitive and less observant, gave her mother more trouble than the others, but she acquiesced at last, that God must know best, though it all seemed rather funny. They were not to earn their own livings because later on--(later on being the term in which the Pinsent parents envisaged their retreat from this world) they would have plenty of money; but they were expected to develop hobbies.
The eldest girls developed splendid hobbies. Agatha, who was the plainest of the three, became a lawn tennis champion with a really smashing serve. Edith distinguished herself by writing a history of one of our western counties. She rode all over it on a bicycle and stayed at vicarages by herself. She earned a hundred pounds by this adventure and had a particularly pleasant notice in the “Spectator.”
Rose was rather slower at taking anything up. She had had pneumonia when she was at school, and it had left her nominally but not at all obstructively delicate.
She played an excellent game of hockey and was her father’s favorite.
It was really for Rose’s sake that they all decided to go to Rome.
They thought Rose would almost certainly settle down to something after that, and it would be good for Edith, who, now she had finished Somersetshire, might like to begin on Rome.
She could at any rate compare the different types of architecture. A friend of hers, a Mr. Bunning, said there wasn’t any architecture in Rome, but you could never be quite sure what Mr. Bunning meant. Edith hadn’t been quite sure for several years--nor apparently had Mr. Bunning, but perhaps their going to Rome might help him to find out. Agatha was very good-natured about it; she said she thought Rome would do as well as anywhere else.
The Pinsents were a most accommodating family and though, of course, they sometimes quarreled, it was all in a loud, direct, natural way, which generally ended in chaff.
They never quarreled with Rose as much as with each other because of her having been rather delicate, still they chaffed her a good deal. She wouldn’t have liked it if they hadn’t.
They knew they weren’t like other families of their class and standing; they prided themselves on talking to people in railway carriages and even crossing the Channel. Of course, they were particularly good sailors but even if they hadn’t been they would have been nice and friendly and not at all stuck up about being sick.
Agatha was thinking of marrying a Canadian who took most magnificent back-handers, Edith was still wondering what Mr. Bunning meant, but Rose was perfectly free.
She’d had two proposals, but both of them had been from men she had known all her life and liked most awfully--but not in that way. So that she’d had, as Mrs. Pinsent put it to her husband, “quite a lot of experience for twenty-one and none of the bother of it.”
Mr. Pinsent growled and said that if Rose married the right kind of man she never would have any bother.
Mrs. Pinsent looked thoughtful; she didn’t want to think that Mr. Pinsent was the wrong kind of man, it would have been dreadful after being married to him for thirty years. Still, she couldn’t honestly have said that she hadn’t had any bother with him.
Probably Mr. Pinsent had forgotten it; men do not remember that kind of thing in the same way.
They chose a French hotel in Rome because they thought it would be more Italian, and when they arrived there everything was just as foreign as possible, which was what the Pinsents wanted--provided that they could get enough hot water.
The Hotel le Roy was even for Rome extraordinarily “black.” Its clientèle was composed of French priests, their sisters, ladies of pronounced age and severity, one or two French families of prehistoric claims, small means and a son at a seminary, and a few Dutch Catholics who were, if anything, blacker than the French, but distinctly pleasanter to the English. Black French Catholics do not like English Protestants. The war may have softened this feeling, but this episode took place a year before the war, when the Entente Cordiale was looked upon as a Socialist blunder to be sharply counteracted in private by a studied coldness of manner.
Mrs. Pinsent, whose French the whole family relied upon, did nothing to improve the situation. She said to Madame la Comtesse de Brenteuil, who couldn’t very well help going up in the lift with her, “Isn’t it a pity the Vatican shuts so often for church things? They say we sha’n’t be able to get into the Sistine chapel in Holy Week, and one of my daughters is writing an article on the Sibyls--it’s really most annoying!”
Madame de Brenteuil looked at Mrs. Pinsent as if she were a smut that had fallen on her sleeve; then, with a weary irony, she observed, “Perhaps, Madame, the English do not realize that the Holy Father is a Catholic?” Mrs. Pinsent was eager to reassure her as to Anglo-Saxon intuitions. She said, “Oh, yes--we quite understand his own personal views--but it isn’t as if Rome really belonged to him, is it?”
Fortunately the lift stopped. It was not Madame de Brenteuil’s étage, but she got out.
After this incident no French person in the Le Roy spoke to Mrs. Pinsent or her daughters, so that it was rather difficult for Léon Legier to begin--especially as he was a third cousin to the Comtesse, and lié to almost everybody there. He had made up his mind to begin from the moment that Rose Pinsent dropped a breakfast roll and blushed as she stooped to pick it up.
He had never seen such a blush before on any woman’s face, and any color he had failed to surprise upon a woman’s face he had naturally supposed could not exist.
Apparently it did, for Rose had it. Her blush was as fine in hue as that of a pink tulip and as delicate as a winter cloud at dawn.
It swept up in a wave from her white throat into her pale, silky, fair hair, and the fact that she suddenly discovered Léon was observing her did not tend to decrease her color. Léon Legier made his opportunity that evening in the hall. The porter was explaining to Mrs. Pinsent what time to start for Tivoli the following morning. His English was limited and he altered the train hour to suit the convenience of the foreign tongue. The greater inconvenience of missing the train had not occurred to him until Léon intervened.
Subsequently Léon discovered that almost all the porter’s other information suffered from similar readjustments of language, and he and Mrs. Pinsent sat down in the lounge to revise the day’s excursion. Mrs. Pinsent should, perhaps, have thought of her daughters, but Léon gave her no time to think of her daughters. He focused her attention upon herself. She felt herself young again, almost dangerous; the young man before her apologetic, diffident, with exquisite manners, was so obviously attracted by her and intent on all that she had to tell him, she had not the heart to cut the conversation short. Later on Mr. Pinsent joined them. He was delighted to find another man to talk to in his own tongue, and who was obviously acquainted with the name of Lloyd George.
It fortunately never transpired that Léon had confused the name of the then Chancellor of the Exchequer with that of a horse who had won the Derby.
Mr. Pinsent told Léon what the English Government really meant and attacked the Italian railway system. Léon listened politely, and it was only at the end of the conversation that Mr. Pinsent discovered his young foreign friend was after all merely French. Not that Mr. Pinsent minded Frenchmen--but they could hardly be held responsible for the state of Italian railways.
In spite of his nationality, however, Léon was able to give Mr. Pinsent the name of a remarkably good wine to be procured at Tivoli; he regretted that the best place to lunch required a slight knowledge of how to order Italian dishes. Mr. Pinsent said it was a pity Léon wasn’t going with them. Léon only hesitated enough not to appear over-eager; his deprecatory, half-delighted eyes sought Mrs. Pinsent’s, and she said quickly, “But perhaps you could come with us?” Léon produced his card. The Pinsents gave him theirs on which was written “Rocketts, Thornton-in-the Hedges,” and on Léon’s was written, No. 9, Faubourg St. Germain, Paris, and there was no one there to point out the deadly disparity between the two addresses.