“Miss Seer, if I had planted my dahlias among yours, really you would, never have found it out. They are an amazing imitation—quite amazing. Condor thinks my taste in hats too loud. But if men had their way we should all dress in black. So depressing! Tea? I should love it. But no, I cannot stay. I have a duty party at home. So dull, but Condor is determined that Hawkhurst shall stand for the Division now he is safely tucked away in the other House himself. All the old party business is beginning again, just as if there had been no war, when we were all shrieking ‘No more party politics.’ ‘No more hidden policies.’ So like us, isn’t it? I shall put Caroline Holmes in the chair at all the women’s meetings. She does so love it—and making speeches. Yes. She is to marry her Major this autumn, but she assures me it will not ‘curtail her activities.’ Curtail! so nice! But where was I? Oh yes, my tea-party, and I would so much rather stay here. I remember I was just going to be clever, and what happened? Oh, we went out to see Violet milk, and we saw the dahlias instead. Good-bye. Good-bye. And come soon to see me.”
So Lady Condor conveyed herself, talking steadily, outside the sitting-room, with Roger North in attendance carrying her various belongings. But as she progressed across the hall, and into her waiting car, she fell upon a most unusual silence. It was not until she was well settled in that she spoke again.
“I don’t like Violet’s looks, Roger,” she said then, her shrewd old eyes very kindly. “Why are there no babies? There should always be a nursery full of babies for the first ten years of a woman’s married life. And where is Fred? You should speak to him about it.”
She waved a friendly hand at him, various articles falling from her lap as she did so, and the car rolled away.
North gave a little snort of bitter laughter as he turned back into the house. Fred? Fred was eating his heart out, catching salmon in Scotland; and Violet was at Thorpe, obsessed by a dead man’s hatred. He was filled with all a man’s desire to cut the whole wretched business summarily, but the thing had got him in its devilish meshes, and there was no escape. He stayed to tea because he felt he must help Ruth, and yet with the uneasy consciousness that he was doing rather the reverse. Violet had fallen into one of the moody silences so common to her now, and, after she had had her tea, went back to her chair by the fire and a book. Ruth and Roger talked of the farm intermittently and with a sense of restraint, and presently Violet tossed her book on to the opposite chair and left the room.
“What is she reading?” asked Roger.
He crossed to the fire and picked the book up. It was The Road to Self-Knowledge, by Rudolph Steiner, and on the flyleaf, neatly written in a stiff small writing, “K. von Schäde.” Then Roger suddenly saw red. The logs still burnt brightly in the grate, and with a concentrated disgust, so violent that it could be felt, he dropped the book into the heart of the flames and rammed it down there with the heel of his riding boot. The smell of burnt leather filled the room before he lifted it, and watched, with grim satisfaction, the printed leaves curl up in the heat.
He made no apology for the act, though presumably the book was now Ruth’s property.
“That will show you just how much help I’m likely to be,” he said. “Always supposing that you are right. And now I’d better go.”
Ruth smiled at him. The child in man will always appeal to a woman. “Yes, go,” she said. “I will let you know if there is anything to tell.”