“Somewhere on the pavement, I suppose. I forgot all about it, to tell the truth. Yours is a very expensive friendship. And, by the way, it was to pay a bet I lost to the parson.”
“What parson?” Larry interjected quickly, with interest.
“The new Cantacuter. (You have to have everything repeated to you, Larry, every time we meet!) I bet him three pounds of salmon that he couldn’t get Billy-boy Blackburn to join his Young Men’s Soul-Savers or whatever he calls them; and he did, so I have to pay up. It’s for their annual bean-feast or something of the kind.”
“He seems an individual with some strength of purpose,” Deborah observed. “But why were you so anxious to know if the best way——?”
Verity kicked her without remorse.
“He has such dreadfully ‘Fall in and follow me’ views about women,” she went on. “Expects them to take a back seat when they’re not wanted, and run and work like blaz—blacks—when they are—under him, of course. Men proudly goose-stepping in front is how he sees life; women trailing meekly behind. That’s his line throughout—though I must say he does his best to sweeten the pill with rather painfully obvious flattery. He comes to see me every other day, to ask me to join things and support things and sing in things and collect for things. He tells me I am so beloved in the village; that I have religious eyes; that my influence for good is—well, little short of the Bishop of London’s. And all the time he regards me merely as a tool for his using! I leave Voltaire and Shaw and the Pankhursts about all over the place when he calls, but he doesn’t see them—he’s too busy collecting me. It’s my face and my voice, I suppose, that make him think I’d be a fine tail to his heavenly comet. But I’ll teach him, see if I don’t!”
“You’d much better leave him alone,” Larrupper remonstrated. “What’s the use of botherin’ about him, anyway?”
“Leave him alone?” Verity’s eyes flashed. “Leave my unfortunate village to struggle with him alone? Never! I’m not a suffragette or anything else in the ironmongery line, but to have a stranger thinking he’s more influence than I in my own place is the very last thing I’ll put up with! He may have Billy-boy and the salmon; he may have his own private little gloat; but there’ll be something very wrong with the universe if Verity Cantacute doesn’t come out top in the end!”
Deb rose. “Well, I’m going,” she said. “I’m very angry with you both, but all the same you’ve warmed the cockles of my heart. No, Larry, I will not be taken home in your car like the remains of the Mayoress. You can come to see me if you insist, but I warn you that I shall not be over-polite to you. Oh, of course I love you, you inky-headed baby! That isn’t the point. The point is that Lyndesays of Crump and Arevar can no longer be on friendly terms with Lyndesays of Kilne. So good-bye.”
Larry stood up, looking pathetic.