After tea, which was a great success, they became very cheery and jolly.
They went for a walk and then back to their boat.
This was the happiest time of the day.
When they reached the station, about half-past six, they found a disagreeable crowd, pushing, screaming, and singing martial songs. As they got into their first-class carriage about a dozen third-class passengers sprang in, just as the train started. Bruce was furious, but nothing could be done, and the journey back to town was taken with Madame Frabelle very nearly pushed on to his knee by a rude young man who practically sat on hers, smoking a bad cigarette in her face.
They tacitly agreed to say nothing about this, and got home in time for dinner, declaring the day to have been a great success.
Bruce had really enjoyed it. Madame Frabelle said she had; though she had a certain little tenderness, half of a motherly kind, for Bruce, she far preferred his society in a comfortable house. She didn't really think he was the ideal companion for the open air. And he was struck, as he had often been before, by her curious way of contradicting herself in conversation. She took any side and argued in favour of it so long as it was striking or romantic. At one moment she would say with the greatest earnestness, for instance, that divorce should not be allowed. Marriage should be for ever, or not at all. At another moment she would argue in favour of that absurd contradiction in terms known as free love, forgetting that she had completely changed round since earlier in the conversation. This was irritating, but he was still impressed with her infallibility, and Edith remarked more every day how curious that infallibility was, and how safe it was to trust. Whenever Madame Frabelle knew that something was going to happen, it didn't, and whenever she had an intuition that something was going to occur, then it was pretty safe. It never would. In the same way she had only to look at a person to see them as they were not. This was so invariable it was really very convenient to have her in the house, for whatever she said was always wrong. One had merely to go by contraries and her prophecies were most useful.
'It's been jolly for you,' Bruce said to Edith, 'having a ripping time in town while I'm taking your visitors about to show them England.'
'You wouldn't have cared for the theatre,' she said. 'But, fancy, I met Aylmer's son there—Aylmer Ross, you know. Aylmer himself is at the front. They have taken their old house again. He means to come back there.'
'Well, I really can't help it,' said Bruce rather fretfully. 'I should be at the front if it weren't for my neurotic heart. The doctor wouldn't hear of passing me—at least one wouldn't. Any fellow who would have done so would be—not a careful man. However, I don't know that it wouldn't have been just as good to die for my country, and get some glory, as to die of heart trouble here.' He sighed.
'Oh no, you won't,' said Edith reassuringly; 'you look the picture of health.'
'I've got a bit of sunburn, I think,' said Bruce, popping up to look in the glass. 'Funny how I do catch the sun. I asked Dr Pollock about it one day.'