THE GREAT CRUSADE
"I was in Great Beeding this morning," said Dick, as he sat at luncheon with his father, "and the blinds were up in Aunt Margaret's house."
"They have returned from their holiday then," his father observed with a tremor in his voice. He looked afraid. Then he looked annoyed.
"Pettifer will break down if he doesn't take care," he exclaimed petulantly. "No man with any sense would work as hard as he does. He ought to have taken two months this year at the least."
"We should still have to meet Aunt Margaret at the end of them," said Dick calmly. He had no belief in Mr. Hazlewood's distress at the overwork of Pettifer.
A month had passed since the inauguration of the great Crusade, and though talk was rife everywhere and indignation in many places loud, a certain amount of success had been won. But all this while Mrs. Pettifer had been away. Now she had returned. Mr. Hazlewood stood in some awe of his sister. She was not ill-natured, but she knew her mind and expressed it forcibly and without delay. She was of a practical limited nature; she saw very clearly what she saw, but she walked in blinkers, and had neither comprehension of nor sympathy with those of a wider vision. She was at this time a woman of forty, comfortable to look upon and the wife of Mr. Robert Pettifer, the head of the well-known firm of solicitors, Pettifer, Gryll and Musgrave. Mrs. Pettifer had very little patience to spare for the idiosyncrasies of her brother, though she owed him a good deal more than patience. For at the time, some twenty years before, when she had married Robert Pettifer, then merely a junior partner of the firm, Harold Hazlewood had alone stood by her. To the rest of the family she was throwing herself away; to her brother Harold she was doing a fine thing, not because it was a fine thing but because it was an exceptional thing. Robert Pettifer however had prospered, and though he had reached an age when he might have claimed his leisure the nine o'clock train still took him daily to London.
"Aunt Margaret isn't after all so violent," said Dick, for whom she kept a very soft place in her heart. But Harold shook his head.
"Your aunt, Richard, has all the primeval ferocity of the average woman."
And then the fires of the enthusiast were set alight in his blue eyes.
"I'll tell you what I'll do: I'll send her my new pamphlet, Richard. It
may have a humanising influence upon her. I have some advance copies.
I'll send her one this afternoon."
Dick's eyes twinkled.
"I should if I were you, though to be sure, sir, we have tried that plan before without any prodigious effect."