She hesitated. "I'd rather you didn't tell Norman," he said. "I like Norman, and I don't mind his chaff a bit. But I'd rather not be chaffed about this, because I feel seriously about it."
"No, Jim, I won't," she said. "I won't tell anybody until you say that I may."
Lady Crowborough and Mrs. Eldridge had retired together after luncheon, into an upstairs drawing-room, which had a still finer view of the surrounding dappled country than the terrace below.
Mrs. Eldridge was in a mood slightly mischievous. She had seen Lady Crowborough thaw towards her husband, whom she had probably designed to keep at arm's length. She had not yet thawed towards herself, and this retirement to a room not often used, instead of to one with a more intimate significance, seemed to mean that she would be treated with all courtesy and consideration due to her, but not admitted to any heart-felt intercourse.
She talked politely, on the surface of things, and Lady Crowborough responded in the same tone, and as if this was exactly what she wished. She even appeared to be taking the stand of a great, but still affable, lady towards a country neighbour of less exalted position, which Mrs. Eldridge encouraged by due submission. But presently she seemed to be getting uneasy at the absence of the intimacy that had existed for years between her and this particular neighbour, and to be inviting a change in the tone of the conversation. Mrs. Eldridge did not respond to the invitation, but became rather more colourlessly polite than before.
"I always think that you have such lovely views from here," she said, looking out of the window. "We have beautiful views from some of our windows at Hayslope—not all—and the Castle shows up so well from there. But of course you can't live in it and have it to look at too."
"No," Lady Crowborough agreed, and added with a smile, as of one who was saying something rather clever: "Sometimes I wish we had it to look at instead of to live in. There seems no end to the expenses of living in a house as large as this, even when you live as simply as we do. Everything has gone up since the war. Everything. Don't you find it so?"
"Yes," said Mrs. Eldridge. "In our small way we do."
"Even clothes," said Lady Crowborough. "I'm really glad not to be in London so much as we used to be. In the country one can wear old clothes, and it doesn't matter."