Peggy, on whose tongue remonstrance with regard to the port was rising, threw off at this.
“What!” she said. “Hugh is going to sing? Why, only a few weeks ago he told me that he had made up his mind not to!”
“Ah, but Hugh is one of those people to whom an enormous number of things happen in a few weeks,” said he.
For one moment Peggy felt a little hurt that Hugh had not told her. She hated that public papers should be the means of communication between herself and her friends. But on the instant she smothered her resentment.
“That is splendid news!” she said. “I must remember to tell Edith. Hugh told us that the syndicate had approached him, and she was so frantic at the idea of his refusal. I wonder what has made him change his mind.”
Then she recollected something.
“I dare say he has already told her,” she added; “I know he was going down to Mannington last Friday.”
“To stay with her?” asked Arthur.
“Oh, no! with his sister, Mrs. Alington. But probably he and Edith met. In fact, he promised to go and see her! They are great friends.”
Peggy heard nothing more of her sister, and so could not meet any train for her at Cookham next day. Both Arthur Crowfoot and her husband, who was going to attend something grandly masonic, went up to town next morning, and as Toby would not be back that night she planned a gorgeously inactive day for herself, intending in the morning to punt herself up not quite so far as Cookham lock, and to tie up under the trees there till lunch-time, with a book that had to be first cut, and then read. She meant to lunch with the children, and to take them down the river toward Maidenhead, and make tea in the punt. The lighting of the spirit-lamp, indeed, would be the only effort she would be called upon to make in the afternoon, for Jim and Daisy, with shrill recrimination, and a good deal of circular movement in mid-Thames, would be responsible for the locomotion, and also for the setting out of tea, all except this lighting of the spirit-lamp, while she would sit still, and be splashed, at not infrequent intervals, for paddles, not punt poles, which were too sensational, were the implements to be applied by the children. And even though their verdict had been that she did not “play” nearly as well as Hugh, this depreciatory criticism did not spoil her own pleasure in being alone all the afternoon with these darling children, and in being real again herself, their mother. London, of course, with its friends, its manifold businesses into which all her time and energies went, was quite real too, but after the months and the fatigue of it, the incessant rush, the froth and bubble in which she so delighted, she felt more real somehow when Jim at the prow and Daisy at the helm abused each other in shrill trebles and appealed to her for decision. Woman of the world as she was to her finger-tips, she was yet woman of the home, and when all was said and done, and all her energies, which were so much a part of her, relaxed, there was still nothing so much a part of her as the children. Often for days together in town she hardly set eyes on them; but that was a fault not of hers, but of her environment, and to live in accordance with that, to slave and toil for that, was her duty also.