Old Lady Hayes laughed a hoarse, masculine laugh, and strode off, snapping her scissors again. Half-way across the lawn she stopped.
"The Grampounds are at home, I suppose," she said. "I want to see Mrs. Grampound some time."
"Oh, yes; I travelled with Miss Grampound yesterday. She said they were all at home."
"Ha! She is very handsome. But a modern young woman, I should think."
"She's not very ancient. She was staying with the Brabizons."
His mother frowned and continued her walk.
Lord Hayes always felt rather like a naughty child under his mother's eye. He did not at present feel quite equal to telling her what his relations with Eva were. Modernity was the one failing for which she had no sympathy, for it was a characteristic of which she did not possess the most rudimentary traces. To her it meant loss of dignity, Americanisms, contempt for orthodoxy, and general relaxation of all that is worthy in man. She preferred the vices of her own generation to the virtues of newer developments, and almost regretted the gradual extinction of the old three-bottle school, for they were, in her opinion, replaced by men who smoked while they were talking to women, while the corresponding women had given way to women who smoked themselves. For a man to drink port wine in company with other men was better, as being a more solid and respectable failing, than for him to talk to a woman with a cigarette between his lips.
Eva, as Lord Hayes had guessed from his point of vantage by the front door of his house, had strolled out into the garden after breakfast with Percy. She had not told him of Lord Hayes's offer, but she could not help talking to him with it in her mind. It was like a bracket preceded by a minus sign, which affected all that was within the bracket.
"I wish you weren't going away, Percy," she said. "When I woke up this morning, I thought with horror of all the slow days that were coming. I don't care a bit for doing all those things which 'nice girls' are supposed to do. I have no enthusiasms, and the enthusiasms of the people I see here are unintelligible to me. The sight of a dozen little boys in a Sunday school, with pomatum on their heads, inspires me with slight disgust—so do bedridden old women. I suppose I have no soul. That is quite possible. But, but—"