“Get into the motor, Madge,” she said. “Are we to wait all day here?”
Then Madge came a step nearer.
“Yes, that used to frighten me,” she said, “but now it does not. And Philip never told you what you said he did. Who was it, then? Nobody else knew.”
Again she took one more step closer.
“Mother, have you been tampering with my letters?” she asked. “For how could you have known otherwise? It is ridiculous to say that Philip told you. What else have you done, I wonder? Now, stand away, please, and let me ring the bell. Or do you propose that you and I, you and I, should fight like fishwives on the pavement?”
The old instinctive right of fighting for one’s own, obscured by centuries of what is called civilisation, obscured, too, in Madge’s own instance by years of obedience, broke out here. She was herself, and nobody else was she. It did not matter one penny-worth who stood between her and the bell; if all the apostles and prophets had stood there she would have fought them all. And Lady Ellington knew that this particular engagement was lost; the bell would be rung. But her plan was not defeated yet, so far as she knew. What she did not know was that mere scheming, mere brain-wrought work on her part, had no chance at all against its adversary. No clever person can understand that until it is enacted under his eyes, and the cleverer he is, the less he will conceive it possible that his spider-weavings can fail to hold their fly. But when passion comes along, it is a bumble-bee that blunders through them all, without knowing that there has been any opposition.
“I certainly do not resemble a fishwife,” she said, “nor have I any intention of acting as one. There is the bell—ring it.”
Madge looked at her for a moment in wide-eyed astonishment, feeling sure that by some trick—anyhow, something underhand—her mother had got her knowledge.
“And for my mother to do that!” she said.
Lady Ellington may or may not have felt the depth of the well from which this sprang. In any case it was beside her purpose to waste a volley on what was merely rhetorical. And the faint tinkle of the electric bell was the only response.