SIXTEENTH
HE elder Lady Ellington had never yet in the whole course of her combative life been knocked out of time by the blows of adverse circumstances, and she did not intend to begin being knocked out now. That Madge’s marriage was a frightful disaster she did not deny or seek to conceal, but her admirable habits of self-control and her invariable custom of never letting anything dwell on her mind or make her worry, served her in good stead now. She considered that Madge and Evelyn had both behaved quite unpardonably, and though she had no thought of pardoning either of them, she had no thought of dwelling on the matter. When the thing was done, it was done, and, like David, she, so to speak, proposed to go and oil herself—in other words, to pay her customary round of summer and autumn visits, carrying with her all her old inflexible firmness and readiness to advise. For Philip, finally, she hardly felt pity at all; a man really must be a fool if he could lose his wife like that at the eleventh hour. It was impossible to acquit him altogether of blame, though it would have puzzled her who had so nearly been his mother-in-law to say exactly where the blame lay. General incapacity to keep what was morally one’s own perhaps covered it, and incapacity of all kinds she detested.
These visits took her up to Scotland about the middle of August, since this was on the whole the easiest way of not getting out of touch with people. Scotland, if one went to the right houses, she considered to be a sort of barometer as to the way people would behave, and the general trend of affairs go, when the gatherings began for the autumn parties in England and people came up to London in the spring; and though she could not have been considered exactly a conventional woman, she very much wanted to know what kind of line society in general would take about Madge. For with all her hard shrewdness, she had not what we may call a sensitive social touch. When Society beat time she could follow it with scrupulous exactitude, but she was not capable of conducting herself. And this concerted piece was rather complex, and though Society had been so unanimous in its condemnation at the time, Lady Ellington, knowing it pretty well, did not feel at all sure that the sentence it passed on July 28th would not be reprieved, whether, in fact, Society would not say that there had been a miscarriage of justice, and that Madge—and Evelyn, for that matter—were entirely innocent and even laudable. For if Philip had wealth, which he undoubtedly had, and Madge had thrown that overboard, she had at any rate picked up, as one picks up a pilot, a man with extraordinary charm and extraordinary gifts, about whom Society was even now on the point of losing its head. Evelyn, in fact, if he continued to be as gay as he always was, to enjoy himself as thoroughly, and also continued to paint pictures which really furnished Society with conversation to quite a remarkable degree, promised well to be as desirable a husband as the other. Also Philip’s stern attention to business during the month of August had done his cause, as has been mentioned, no inconsiderable damage. Indeed if he had married old Lady Ellington instead it perhaps would have been more suitable. But having failed to secure the rose, he had not shown any inclination to be near it, and had gone to the City instead.
It was all this which Lady Ellington hoped to pick up in Scotland. She wanted, in fact, to know what would be her most correct attitude towards Madge. Her own personal attitude she knew well enough; she was still quite furious with her. But (she put it to herself almost piously) it is better sometimes to sink the personal feeling in the deep waters of the public good, just as you drown a superfluous kitten. However she felt privately, it might be kinder and wiser to conceal and even eradicate that personal grudge. She went, in fact, in order to see whether Society was possibly taking a more Christian line about her daughter than her daughter’s mother really was. Strange as the fact may sound, this was the fact, for it would never do that Madge’s mother should on the one hand be estranged from her daughter, while all the world embraced her; nor, on the other, that Madge’s mother should continue to embrace her daughter while all the world discreetly looked the other way and said “That minx!”
Now, as has already been briefly stated, the country verdict about Madge, the verdict, that is to say, of London gone into the country, had reaped the benefit of country air and early hours. The personal inconvenience and the necessary incidental chatter had died down; nobody really cared about it; the stern condemnation originally made was felt to be but a hollow voice, and Society, which, whatever may be said about it, is really rather indulgent, just as it hopes individually for indulgence, in that most unlikely contingency of indulgence being desirable, was already, without the slightest sign of embarrassment, executing a volte-face. For if the volte-face is general, the only embarrassment arises from not executing it. And Lady Dover’s house, which, so to speak, kept social Greenwich time without error, was the first place that Lady Ellington visited.