“Ah, muffins,” said Lady Sunningdale, in a mollified tone. “The under-piece, please, Martin. How delicious! But, though I am not cynical, I always a little distrust moral purposes. If you do a thing with a moral purpose, it usually means that you do it because if you didn’t you would be uncomfortable inside. Good people are such cowards,—they are afraid of a little pain in their consciences. To avoid that they go and act in some foolish, antiquated manner, and every one says, ‘What a saint!’”
Then, out of all this nebulousness, like the gathering clouds of a thunder-storm, there leaped a sudden flash, like lightning, and rather like genius.
“She is doing sacrifice to an ideal she doesn’t fully believe in,” she said. “Helen doesn’t believe in certain things as your father does. Else she would never marry Frank at all. She would have screamed loudly for help when he asked her, instead of saying ‘Yes.’ Her sacrifice, therefore, isn’t quite sincere.”
Then a sort of confusing roar of thunder followed, marring the sharp conclusiveness of the lightning.
“I cannot bear seeing people making a mess of their lives,” she said, “and it is such a pleasure to see them make a really clean job of them. Yes. Why continue poking round in a parsonage, when you have made up your mind to go away? It is like ordering the carriage to go to the station, and then, for no reason, saying that you will go by the next train. She has shattered the happy parsonage life, and is feebly trying to pick up the bits, instead of ringing the bell and leaving the Room. It is silly.”
“Ah, Helen is not silly,” said her brother.
“I did not say that. Yes, slap Sahara twice, hard. But I said she is doing a silly thing. Now, I am silly, but I hardly ever do a silly thing. Yes, come in. It must be Frank. Sunningdale never knocks, and nobody else ever comes in.”
Frank appeared at the door.
“I was sent for,” he said, apologetically. “Ah, Martin.”
That rang true. “You are her brother,” was behind it, and the romantic touch did not escape, though it rather irritated, Lady Sunningdale. Personally, she disliked romance on the general grounds that in real life it was old-fashioned. To her the two completely satisfactory methods of expression were melodrama and farce. And Frank’s greeting to Martin, the hand on the shoulder, the linked arm, was all romantic, and just a little tiresome.