“No, Miss Dunnock, whatever you may say, I know that the kind of caddish selfishness we have been talking about is absolutely abhorrent to you, as it is to all decent people. I quite agree with you that there is something pathetic in the old Sothebys, but there is nothing to be said for the son.”
“Well, they seem to be an unusually happy family,” answered Anne, feeling that she had lost her temper.
“I am too old to play at Happy Families any longer,” said her father with a titter. “I shall go back to the ice and leave Mr. Yockney and you to settle the momentous question of Master Grits the Grocer’s son.”
SIX: WINGED SEEDS
“Why is it?” Anne Dunnock asked herself next day, “that my father can be pleasant to other people but not to me? Though to be sure I fancied yesterday that his pleasantness to Mr. Yockney was a trifle vulgar, while his unpleasantness to me has at all events the merit of being sincere and well-bred.” And Anne told herself that the only explanation must be that she was as much a burden to her father as he was to her. “But only I realize it,” she burst out. “For I am young enough to recognize the truth, and to welcome it; he does not understand himself or other people; all his life he has hidden his head in the sand like an ostrich, and after all what else can one expect of a clergyman?”
Her anger had lasted since the conversation about the Sothebys, for her irritation during the lunch beside the ice had been quickly followed by fatigue, which had intensified her resentment. After the unaccustomed exercise her ankles seemed to have turned to jelly, and the eight-mile walk from Bluntisham had been torture to her.
“Never again,” she said to herself; and when Mr. Lambert had stopped at the door next morning to offer her a place in his gig (he was going to Bluntisham for the skating), she had refused, and her father had accepted in her place.
“If I want any skating I shall go on the Broad Ditch,” she had said, a remark which had estranged Mr. Dunnock more than her sullenness the previous day had done, and he drove off with a hurt look which said: “You are no daughter of mine to speak of skating in such a way before a stranger!”
When the gig was out of sight Anne went indoors to write a letter to Coventry for a catalogue of bicycles.
The catalogue came, but though she selected a machine, she hesitated to post the letter ordering it, and after a week’s indecision she tore it up, since the thought had come to her that a bicycle would tie her more firmly than ever to her life with her father, and this life seemed every day to become less endurable.