"I dare say you're right," said Eileen Cavendish. She moved idly about the room examining photographs and puffing her cigarette. "But even the War isn't going to make me fall on the neck of a woman I don't like. But I'm talking like a cat. It's not seeing Bill for so long…."
Mrs. Clavering smiled. "No," she said, "I agree there are limits. But up here, what does it matter if a woman's husband is an Engineer or a Paymaster or a Commander or only an impecunious Lieutenant like mine—as long as she is nice? Yet if it weren't for people like Sybil Gascoigne we should all be clinging to our ridiculous little pre-war sets, and talking of branches and seniority till we died of loneliness and boredom with our aristocratic noses in the air…. As it is, I don't believe even Sybil Gascoigne could have done it if she hadn't been the Honourable Mrs. Gascoigne. That carried her over some pretty rough ground, childish though it sounds."
"Bong Song!" interposed Mrs. Cavendish flippantly. "As——" She broke off abruptly. "There I go again! There's no doubt about it: I have got a liver … I think I'll go home and write to Bill. That always does me good."
That tea-party was the first of many similar informal gatherings of grass-widows in poky rooms and cottage parlours. They were quite young for the most part, and many were pretty. They drank each other's tea and talked about their husbands and the price of things, and occasionally of happenings in an incredibly remote past when one hunted and went to dances and bought pretty frocks.
It was Etta Clavering who conducted Betty round the village shops on the morning after her arrival, where she was introduced to the small Scottish shopkeeper getting rich quick, and the unedifying revelation of naked greed cringing behind every tiny counter.
Through Eileen Cavendish, moreover, she secured the goodwill of a washerwoman.
"My dear," said her benefactress, "money won't tempt them. They've got beyond that. They've got to like you before they will wring out a stocking for you. But I'll take you to the Widow Twankey; I'm one of her protégées, and she shows her affection for me by feeling for my ribs with her first two fingers to punctuate her remarks with prods. It always makes me hysterical. She has only got two teeth, and they don't meet."
So the Widow Twankey was sought out, and Betty stood and looked appealingly humble while Etta Cavendish suffered her ribs to be prodded in a good cause, and the Widow agreed to "wash for" Betty at rates that would have brought blushes to the cheeks of a Parisian blanchisseuse de fin.
With Mrs. Gascoigne, Betty explored the heathery moors where the distraught pee-wits were already nesting, and the cool, clean air blew down from the snowy Grampians, bracing the walkers like a draught of iced wine. They even climbed some of the nearer hills, forcing their way through the tangled spruce-branches and undergrowth to the summit, from where the distant North Sea itself was visible, lying like a grey menace to their peace.
They would return from these expeditions by the path down the glen that wound close to the brawling river; here, in the evenings, sometimes with an unexpectedness embarrassing to both parties, they met some of the reunited couples whom Eileen Cavendish found it hard to contemplate unmoved; occasionally the fingers of such couples were interlaced, and they talked very earnestly as they walked.