“No, mother,” he said casually. “We were just kicking the ball about a bit. Am I late?”
“Better go and tidy yourself,” she said, not replying to his question. “You can’t sit down in that state. And I’ll have some fresh tea made. This is spoilt.”
“Oh, very well!”
Her sacred tea—the institution which she wanted to hallow by long habit, and which was to count before everything with both of them—had been carelessly sacrificed to the kicking of a football in mud! And his father buried not ten days! She was wounded: a deep, clean, dangerous wound that would not bleed. She tried to be glad that he had not lied; he might easily have lied, saying that he had been detained for a fault and could not help being late. No! He was not given to lying; he would lie, like any human being, when a great occasion demanded such prudence, but he was not a liar; he might fairly be called a truthful boy. She tried to be glad, and did not succeed. She would have preferred him to have lied.
Amy, grumbling, had to boil more water.
When he returned to the parlour, superficially cleaned, Constance expected him to apologize in his roundabout boyish way; at any rate to woo and wheedle her, to show by some gesture that he was conscious of having put an affront on her. But his attitude was quite otherwise. His attitude was rather brusque and overbearing and noisy. He ate a very considerable amount of jam, far too quickly, and then asked for more, in a tone of a monarch who calls for his own. And ere tea was finished he said boldly, apropos of nothing:
“I say, mother, you’ll just have to let me go to the School of Art after Easter.”
And stared at her with a fixed challenge in his eyes.
He meant, by the School of Art, the evening classes at the School of Art. His father had decided absolutely against the project. His father had said that it would interfere with his lessons, would keep him up too late at night, and involve absence from home in the evening. The last had always been the real objection. His father had not been able to believe that Cyril’s desire to study art sprang purely from his love of art; he could not avoid suspecting that it was a plan to obtain freedom in the evenings—that freedom which Samuel had invariably forbidden. In all Cyril’s suggestions Samuel had been ready to detect the same scheme lurking. He had finally said that when Cyril left school and took to a vocation, then he could study art at night if he chose, but not before.
“You know what your father said!” Constance replied.