George flushed and looked foolish and sat down; and Ingpen quizzed him. All three knew well that Edwin's fierceness was only one among sundry consequences of the mood of the housemistress. The slow movement and the scherzo from the symphony were played. And while the music went on, Edwin heard distantly the opening and shutting of the front-door and an arrival in the hall, and then chattering. Maggie had called. "What's she after?" thought Edwin.
"Hoo! There's Auntie Maggie!" George exclaimed, as soon as the scherzo was finished, and ran off.
"That boy is really musical," said Ingpen with conviction.
"Yes, I suppose he is," Edwin agreed casually, as though deprecating a talent which however was undeniable. "But you'd never guess he's got a bad headache, would you?"
It was a strange kind of social evening, and Hilda--it seemed to the august Edwin--had a strange notion of the duties of hostess. Surely, if Mrs. Tams was in the kitchen, Hilda ought to be in the drawing-room with their guest! Surely Maggie ought to have been brought into the drawing-room,--she was not a school girl, she was a woman of over forty, and yet she had quite inexcusably kept her ancient awkwardness and timidities. He could hear chatterings from the dining-room, scurryings through the hall, and chatterings from the kitchen; then a smash of crockery, a slight scream, and girlish gigglings. They were all the same, all the women he knew, except perhaps Clara,--they had hours when they seemed to forget that they were adult and that their skirts were long. And how was it that Hilda and Maggie were suddenly so intimate, they whose discreet mutual jealousy was an undeniable phenomenon of the family life? With all his majesty he was simpleton enough never to have understood that two women who eternally suspect each other may yet dissolve upon occasion into the most touching playful tenderness. The whole ground-floor was full of the rumour of an apparent alliance between Hilda and Maggie. And as he listened Edwin glanced sternly at the columns of the evening Signal, while Tertius Ingpen, absorbed, worked his way bravely through a sonata of Beethoven.
Then George reappeared.
"Mother's going to take me to London to-morrow about my eyes," said George to Ingpen, stopping the sonata by his mere sense of the terrific importance of such tidings. And he proceeded to describe the projected doings in London, the visit to Charlie and Janet Orgreave, and possibly to the Egyptian Hall.
Edwin did not move. He kept an admirable and complete calm under the blow. Hilda was decided, then, to defy him. In telling the boy, who during the meal had been permitted to learn nothing, she had burnt her boats; she had even burnt Edwin's boats also: which seemed to be contrary to the rules laid down by society for conjugal warfare,--but women never could fight according to rules! The difficulties and dangers of the great pitched battle which Edwin had planned for the close of the evening were swiftly multiplied. He had misgivings.
The chattering, giggling girls entered the drawing-room. But as Maggie came through the doorway her face stiffened; her eyes took on a glaze; and when Ingpen bent over her hand in all the false ardour of his excessive conventional chivalry, the spinster's terrible constraint--scourge of all her social existence--gripped her like a disease. She could scarcely speak.
"Hello, Mag," Edwin greeted her.