‘I must say I am surprised at your not seeing Miss Propert home,’ she said. ‘After bringing her into my drawing-room and forcing me to be civil to her, you might have had the civility yourself to see her to her house.’
He was aware that she was intending to exercise the dead-weight somewhere. It was not many weeks ago that she had brought it into play regarding Mr Silverdale and his Romish practices, when she had refused to leave his church for the simpler rites of the Cathedral. He had yielded there, because he did not really care whether she and Alice chose to attend a milliner-church or not. They might if they liked: it did not seriously matter. But the dead-weight, if she was intending to exercise it over the question of Norah, mattered very much.
‘Would it have pleased you better if I had seen her home?’ he asked.
‘I can’t say whether I should have been pleased or not,’ she said. ‘It didn’t happen. But I’m sure I don’t know why you sent your typewriter in here to talk to me. I don’t know what you think I should find to say to her. With Alice here too.’
She had said too much, and knew it the moment she had said it. But the mists had congealed, and she felt obliged, as she would have expressed it, say, to Mrs Fyson, to speak her mind. She did not really speak her mind; she spoke what some perfectly groundless jealousy dictated to her.
He dropped the paper, and stood up by the fireplace.
‘You said, “With Alice here too,.”’ he said. ‘Oblige me by telling me what you mean.’
She saw that in a reasonable frame of mind she would not have meant anything. But she was cross and surfeited, and the cold in the head which had spared her so long was seriously threatening. She wanted, out of sheer perverseness, to defend an indefensible position.
‘Well, I’m sure Alice must have thought it very odd your bringing your typewriter into my drawing-room,’ she said.