Mary jumped up from her chair and took his hands. "James," she whispered, "I sometimes wish there were something Trent wasn't good at!"
James kissed her. That was all right! Here was the old lady quite cheerful again. They must all be very kind to her for a day or two, and when she realised that Rosemary wasn't leaving her yet and got used to Anthony's new status she would see that there was nothing to be unhappy about for a long time. And when the disaster came she would be busy waging war on Laura's nurses.
"I told Rosemary she could have her young man to dinner, my dear," he said, apprehensive, but feeling that on the whole it was better to get it over. "It seemed the only decent thing to do."
His wife appeared to have accepted the worst. Her "I'm glad, I forgot to tell her," was serene. "Laura's been here to say that she and Harry aren't coming. That's just as well, Trent will be quite enough for them in one evening."
[CHAPTER II]
BUT Mrs. Heyham, though she did her best, could not settle down as she ought to have done. James watched her carefully, and though she was charming about it he felt that the engagement still distressed her. She was a little pale, he thought, and detached and indifferent to carefully planned amusements. Something more radical would have to be done. He would have liked to take her abroad, but he had business matters in hand which he could not trust to Trent. Nevertheless things must not remain as they were. He took his problem to Rosemary, whose own conscience was not untroubled. "We've got to think of some way," he told her, "of interesting your mother."
Rosemary agreed with him. Now that she turned her mind to it she could see that her mother's life needed interests. For what, when she came to express her sense of it, had Mary's life been? She expended some little ingenuity in pointing and amplifying her own conception of such an existence before, in her turn, she consulted Anthony.
Her mother, that was the gist of it, had not lived. Here, in this great world of speed and steel and electricity, this world of banks and syndicates and organised labour, Mrs. Heyham had kept her house and nursed her babies as she might have done a hundred, five hundred, years ago. She used the clothes and the food and the furniture of the twentieth century because they were there, at her hand. She knew nothing of how they were made or of what brought them to her. She lived like an insect in a coral reef, ignorant of the laws by which she was governed. Mathematics, the triumph of man's intellect, meant some x's and y's, some circles and triangles in children's school-books. Philosophy meant that a great many cultivated people do not believe in God. Biology meant that in some indiscreet manner we are descended from monkeys; economics that the Conservatives think a lot can be done with Tariff Reform, and the Liberals have been left to make the best of Free Trade. Industry was represented in her mind by the shops where she bought her clothes and ordered her provisions, by factories, heard of but never seen, by a bank with large stone pillars that sent her cheque-books, by so much money from her husband every week. When she tried to escape from it all, at least to vary it, she travelled on padded seats of first-class carriages, she slept in hotels where she was carried to her room in a lift, she stared at views whose last details of excellence had been dissected in guide books. Public opinion, since she was a rich woman, did not allow Mr. Heyham to beat her or to take her money, and she could walk alone in the street without being insulted. She could read novels about other women's love-affairs, she could turn up the light in her house by putting her finger on a knob. Yet she had no clue to the meaning of her life or of the lives of the people who served her and worked for her. She knew as little of the city she lived in as she knew of the fields where primitive women toiled. She was shut off—like all of us, Rosemary thought—from the wild things of the earth, from its oceans, its forests, its snows. She was denied man's heritage of knowledge, the rewards of his search for truth. She was sheltered from the need of working with her hands. She had lost the keenness of her savage senses and the strength of her savage impulses. She had lost her bodily hardness, her mental vigour and curiosity. Even her love of luxury had gone—she did not care, as some women do, to scent herself and hang herself with jewels, to wrap herself in soft furs and in supple bright-coloured stuffs. All these desires had withered to a mere dislike of dirt and disorder, a vague positive aspiration that things should be nice. Mrs. Heyham was a graceful woman, good, simple, sensitive. She respected herself and she was respected by others. That was her spiritual share of the loot of the centuries!
They were walking through the park to Hampton Court when Rosemary tried to impose this view of the matter on Anthony. He listened to it with interest but without excitement. He was a fair-haired, sunny-tempered youth, a little lazy about giving rein to his own enthusiasm but tolerant of Rosemary's, for he admired her wits. It was a fine afternoon. He turned appreciative eyes to the long lines of trees changing from green to grey in the slight pleasant haze. Then he looked back at Rosemary. "Well," he asked her, "granting all that—and you've put it very nicely—what is your solution?"
Rosemary had thought of a solution and a very good solution too, suitable, revolutionary, and high-minded. She was not deterred from explaining it by Tony's indolent tone. Rosemary was herself a Socialist and she could not help feeling that if her mother were to take up some sort of work among her father's employees the results must be thoroughly satisfactory to all right-thinking people. Her father was a good employer—neither she nor Anthony doubted it—but it is admitted that only a woman can understand a woman's difficulties. If you thought of the matter with an open mind, some such devotion of herself seemed only Mrs. Heyham's duty. There could be no doubt that she ate and wore the profits of the business.