Between sobs George replied with overwhelming disillusioned disgust:
"What's the good of telling you anything? You only think I'm codding."
And he passed upstairs, apparently the broken victim of fate and parents, but in reality triumphant. His triumph was such that neither Edwin nor Hilda dared even to protest against the use of such an inexcusable word as 'codding.'
Hilda went into the kitchen, and Edwin rather aimlessly followed her. He felt incompetent. He could do nothing except carry trays, and he had no desire to carry trays. Neither spoke. Hilda was bending over the fire, then she arranged the grid in front of the fire to hold a tin, and she greased the tin. He thought she looked very wistful, for all the somewhat bitter sturdiness of her demeanour. Tertius Ingpen was due for the evening; she had no servants--through her own fault; and now a new phase had arrived in the unending responsibility for George's welfare. He knew that she was blaming him on account of George. He knew that she believed in the sincerity of George's outburst; he believed in it himself. The spectacles were wrong; the headache was genuine. And he, Edwin, was guilty of the spectacles because he had forced Hilda, by his calm bantering commonsense, to consult a small local optician of good reputation.
Hilda had wanted to go to Birmingham or Manchester; but Edwin said that such an idea was absurd. The best local optician was good enough for the great majority of the inhabitants of the Five Towns and would be good enough for George. Why not indeed? Why the craze for specialists? There could be nothing uniquely wrong with the boy's eyes,--it was a temporary weakness. And so on and so on, in accordance with Edwin's instinct for denying the existence of a crisis. And the local optician, consulted, had borne him out. The local optician said that every year he dealt with dozens of cases similar to George's. And now both the local optician and Edwin were overthrown by a boy's sobbing tears.
Suddenly Hilda turned round upon her husband.
"I shall take George to London to-morrow about his eyes," she said, with immense purpose and sincerity, in a kind of fierce challenge.
This was her amends to George for having often disbelieved him, and for having suspected him of taking after his father. She made her amends passionately, and with all the force of her temperament. In her eyes George was now a martyr.
"To London?" exclaimed Edwin weakly.
"Yes. It's no use half doing these things. I shall ask Charlie Orgreave to recommend me a first-class oculist."