“No, it is terrible: we will not think of it,” said Aline. “Dearest Helen, what shall we stay-at-homes do? I must just go down to the church and take some flowers, but after that I am quite at your disposal. Is it not a divine morning? Such a morning makes me feel twenty years old again. I have to remind myself that I am a staid old matron, with three great boys and a bear of a husband who will not take his lunch with me.”
The sun was warm along the south side of the house, and while Aline went to see her husband and Mr. Tempest start, the two others strolled out on the flagged walk. Mr. Boyton, as usual, was a little acid in the morning: what is called “a good night’s rest” always disturbed his temper.
“Our charming hosts seem in the most extravagant spirits to-day,” he said. “Personally, I have to break myself to myself every morning, and that depresses me. When on the top of that I come down and find little smiles and pinches and intimacies going on, and in the escape from them into the daily papers am confronted with this appalling disaster to our Allies, I merely descend into the pit from which I was digged. Then there was the renewal of the odious proposition that I should wade through turnips all day.”
Helen made a desperate attempt to be consistent with her object in coming into the country.
“Ah, don’t remind me of the paper and anything it may contain,” she said. “Let us spend one of those idle days, when we were all so engrossingly busy from morning till night. All the resources of civilization are at our disposal; how shall we use them to the best advantage?”
“Let me fly to the lift, and spend the morning going up and down, listening to German chorales,” suggested he. “What I dread is the invasion of the children, and the long acts of homage and admiration that that will entail. I think we should be safe in the lift.”
Once again she tried to imagine herself all October at Grote with Mr. Boyton, and one or two other unoccupied people in rotation. Would it be as difficult to plan the occupation of those days as to plan the hours of this? She longed to take the paper from his hand, and just give one glance at it, to see how serious the Russian defeat was. But she put that away from her.
Mr. Boyton, like a lemon-squeezer, continued to drip with acid expressions.
“I envy the superb vitality of our hostess,” he said. “Yesterday evening I felt that she in her own delightful person embodied the whole spirit of the Entente, and yet this morning, in spite of the bad news, she has attained to heights of elation rarely witnessed. What a superb thing it is to be able to dissociate yourself entirely from such disasters. Let us do the same, my dear lady, and sing chorales in the lift. Or shall we tranquillize ourselves in the cooling-room?”
Helen found herself suddenly disliking Mr. Boyton. He was offending against the obligations implied by the acceptance of hospitality in these reflections, and she could no more go on listening to them than she could last night have encouraged Simpson to develop her ideas about the house of Huns.