“Yes; I was having a wash myself. I have had rather an agitating talk.”
Jeannie knew that he had been to see his mother, and did not see her way to any reply. She supposed that the picture was at the bottom of it.
“It was about a friend of mine,” continued Jack, “who got into great trouble. We disagreed hopelessly, my mother and I. It is a bore. Oh, I want washing!” he cried, and turned to look at the water again.
Jeannie had a sort of fleeting idea that she had only seen this young man for the first time that morning, and that convention would call confidences premature. But convention meant little to her; she did not wilfully neglect it, but she simply forgot its existence.
“Oh, but we must expect to disagree with people,” she said. “Think how extraordinarily tame the world would be if we didn’t! We should spend our whole lives in admiring the views of other people which tallied so exactly with our own.”
“But do you like disagreeing with people who are very near you?” he asked.
Jeannie considered a moment.
“I don’t suppose I have agreed with Aunt Em about anything for five years,” she said.
Jack laughed.
“But you have not disagreed—not radically, I mean.”