PEGGY had brought her season to an end on the same day on which Hugh had gone down to St. Olaf’s, and had retired with the sense of a child home from its holidays to spend a whole week with the children at Cookham, before taking her husband out to Marienbad for three weeks’ cure. She had taken Arthur Crowfoot down with her for the Sunday, but he did so much deep breathing (for in the cycle of things that had come up again) and wanted such very extraordinary things to eat that he was as bad as a party in the house. Even that, though she had come down in order to do nothing, she would not have minded, had he not insisted on talking quite continuously about the impossibility of preserving even the semblance of decent health if your diet comprised anything outside nuts, cheese, and brown bread. Indeed, on Sunday evening, when he had sent for a pair of goloshes to put over his shoes, for they were dining in the tent, and the second thickest of his Angora wool rugs to put over his knees, she clapped her hands in his face.
“You are getting tiresome, Arthur,” she said, “and as a friend I warn you. Nobody cares about your waste products or nuts, nor whether you catch cold; but they care very much whether you bore them or not. People always consider a bore a waste product.”
Arthur pushed back his rather thin and scanty hair, for the sake of which he never wore a hat. This clapping of Peggy’s hands in his face had considerably startled him.
“How violent you are!” he said, “and how unfair! I think it is one’s duty to keep oneself as well as possible.”
“Yes, I daresay it is,” said she; “but it is no part of your duty to tell me about it. I am charmed that you feel well, and you may eat anything you choose, only I don’t want to know about it. Personally I eat somewhat large quantities of meat, and feel extremely well, but I don’t tell everybody about it. I dare say also it’s your duty to be kind and thoughtful, but that would form a very poor subject of conversation!”
Arthur Crowfoot’s goloshes and second thickest rug had come by this time, and this probably restored any loss of equanimity that Peggy’s criticisms could have produced.
“Well, let us talk about somebody else’s virtues,” he said.
“Mine,” suggested Toby, who had not yet spoken, from the other side of the table.
“Your virtues are that you are going off to Marienbad on Thursday, like a good boy,” said Peggy.
“I know I am. What a filthy hole! Are you sure you’ll come, Peggy?”