Mrs. Hancock looked despairingly round.
"It is most annoying," she said. "I do not know that we should not have done better to have had lunch at an inn at Reading, or to have stopped at that first place. Remember to tell Edward, dear, to look out for that first place if he drives down; there is positively nowhere after that where he can find a quiet spot. I wonder if we had better eat a couple of biscuits now in case we can't find a suitable place soon. Dear me, here come those sheep again! They ought not to be allowed to drive sheep along a road that is meant for carriages. Put the window up, dear, against the dust."
Suddenly illumination like a cloud-piercing ray shone on Edith. It struck her that all her life had been spent in looking for a place to have lunch in, so to speak, in putting up windows for fear of the dust, in avoiding the proximity of tramps. Infinitesimal as was the occasion, it seemed to throw an amazing light on to her life. Up till the present it was hardly an exaggeration to say that anything more important, anything more directly concerned with existence had never happened to her. Was it this comfortable ordered life in which an infinite agglomeration of utterly trivial things made up the sum total that caused her lately discovered country to appear so barren? She looked at her mother's face; it was flushed with childish annoyance, just as it had been about three years ago when a perfectly satisfactory housemaid gave notice because she was going to be married. Since then she could remember nothing that had so disconcerted her mother, except when once Denton shut the corner of the new fur carriage-rug into the hinge of the motor-door. On both these previous occasions she had been impressed with the magnitude of the moment; now she felt slightly inclined to laugh. Even if the unthinkable, the supreme disaster happened, and they did not lunch at all, would the world come completely to an end?
But a second glance at her mother's face checked her tendency to laugh, and encouraged a feeling that was quite as novel to her. She felt suddenly and overwhelmingly sorry that this drive, this lunch which her mother had planned with such care and with such pleased anticipation of comfort, should have disappointed her. It was like a child's disappointment over the breakage of a toy or the non-fulfilment of some engaging expedition. There was laughter in her heart no longer; only a tenderness, a commiseration that sympathized in womanly fashion with a childish trouble.
It is darkest before dawn, and this Cimmerian gloom, composed of puncture and the absence of a possible luncheon place, began to lift. Denton was handy with his tools; the sheep were herded through a gate into a field by the roadside, so that when they went on again there was no further passage through the flock to be negotiated. Goring streamed swiftly by them, and hardly were they quit of its outlying houses when a soft stretch of grass by the roadside, uncontaminated by tramp and untenanted by child, spread itself before their eyes. And Mrs. Hancock, as she finished the last jam puff, was more beaming than the sun of this lovely May afternoon.
"I'm not sure that it was not worth while going through all these annoyances and delays," she said, "to have found such a lovely place and to have enjoyed our lunch so much. I was afraid the jam might have run out of the puffs; but it was as safe as if they had just come up from the kitchen. I wish Edward was here to have enjoyed it with us. You must tell him what a good lunch we had!"
And Edith found her mother's enjoyment as tenderly pathetic as her disappointment had been.