“Well, she was rude.”
“But that is no reason for me,” Alix slightly smiled, looking up at him.
“By Jove, no!” Giles, with a rueful laugh, rubbed his hand through his hair. “Ruth’s manners could never be a reason for yours, could they! I say, you know, that’s a nasty one, Alix!”
“I do not mean it to be nasty. And she did not mean to be rude,” said Alix. “She meant only to be funny.”
“That makes her stupid, then, as well as conceited,” said Giles.
If she took refuge with Giles, it was curious and touching to Alix to note that before Ruth’s assaults Mrs. Bradley more and more took refuge with her. When Ruth, with a shout of laughter, crowed “Victorian!” at her mother, Alix begged that the inferiority of this term should be explained to her. “For in Maman’s salon,” she observed, “clever people—I mean the ones your clever people quarrel over in the reviews as to who should claim to have first read them—admire even George Eliot and Ruskin, I assure you. Admire them greatly.”
“Help! Help!” shrieked Ruth. She knew nothing of the clever people in Maman’s salon. She had not advanced to the recognition of cleverness beyond her reach; she had advanced only as far as scorn for unfashionable tastes, and in herself, as Alix, musing on her, perceived, she had none of the stuff from which new valuations are made.
“And you know,” Mrs. Bradley, for the sake of historical accuracy put forward—evading by the mere force of her impersonality any altercation—“it wasn’t really so long ago when I was young, Ruth. I didn’t live in the time of crinolines. I was reading my Dostoievsky in French and my Hardy in English when I was your age, and I don’t seem to see that you young people have got beyond them.”
“Oh, Mummy darling, it’s not a question of what you read or don’t read!” cried Ruth, affectionately ruffling her mother’s head. “It’s the colour of your mind! It’s the pattern of your complexes!”
“There’s some truth in that, you know,” Mrs. Bradley observed to Alix when, after this sally, Ruth seized her hockey stick and strode away.