He left his brother, armed himself with a brassey, proceeded to the twenty-acre field, and made the longest drive of his experience. At lunch James announced that he and Beatrice must be getting back to town that afternoon, a resolution in which his host acquiesced without even a conventional murmur of protest. Perhaps it was this attitude of John's that stung Beatrice into a challenge, or perhaps she had been egged on by the mothers who, with their children's future to consider, were not anxious to declare open war upon the rich uncle. At any rate, in her commonest voice she said:
"It's plain that Jimmie and I are not wanted here any longer."
The mothers looked down at their plates with what they hoped was a strictly neutral expression. Yet it was impossible not to feel that they were triumphantly digging one another in the ribs with ghostly fingers, such an atmosphere of suppressed elation was discernible above the modest attention they paid to the food before them. Nobody made an effort to cover the awkwardness created by the remark, and John was faced with the alternative of contradicting it or acknowledging its truth; he was certainly not going to be allowed to ignore it in a burst of general conversation.
"I think that is rather a foolish remark, Beatrice," was his comment.
She shrugged her shoulders so emphatically that her stays creaked in the horrid silence that enveloped the table.
"Well, we can't all be as clever as Miss Hamilton, and most of us wouldn't like to be, what's more."
"The dog-cart will be round at three," John replied, coldly.
His sister-in-law, bursting into tears, rushed from the room. James guffawed and helped himself to potatoes. The various mothers reproved their children for breaches of table manners. George looked nervously at his wife as if she was on the point of following the example of Beatrice. Grandmama, who was daily receding further and further into the past, put on her spectacles and told John, reproachfully, that he ought not to tease little Beatrice. Hugh engaged Miss Hamilton in a conversation about Bernard Shaw. John, forgetting he had already dipped twice in mustard the morsel of beef upon his fork, dipped it again, so that his eyes presently filled with tears, to which the observant Harold called everybody's attention.
"Don't make personal remarks, darling," his mother whispered.
"That's what Johnnie said to me this morning," James chuckled.