“Is it necessary to make such a mountain out of a molehill?” he inquired. “My little nephew tells lies. Excuse me, Rose, for saying so, but I think we have your word for it. It is quite a common failing amongst children. His contemporaries will teach him the disadvantages attached to fibbing in a very much more practical manner than we can. Need we discuss it any longer? Lucian, a whisky-and-soda? Mother, you must be tired.”
“Yes.” The old lady rolled up her knitting. “Think it over quietly, Rose. There’s no hurry.”
Rose’s dilated eyes were fixed upon her brother-in-law, and Lucian made one movement forward.
He felt a rush of relief when the tension snapped with a torrent of words, hurled straight at Ford Aviolet.
“You snob—you prig! You could help me—and you won’t. You only care that your nephew should do what every other boy does—so that he shall turn out a little gentleman, able to play games, and talk the right slang, and get the rotten public-school point of view. You don’t care what he’s like, so long as he never gets found out. That’s what your public-school education will teach him: that he may go on telling lies, so long as nobody catches him at it—that sex is just a dirty sort of joke—that religion is going to church in a top hat—that the only thing that matters is to conform—conform—conform to type, all along the line.”
Rose Aviolet had made her scene.
She had hurled her fury, her passionate invective, like a wave against the rock of their immoveable good breeding.
Lucian, the sharpness of his perceptions seeming doubly intensified, could view the wreckage. It was Rose that was spent and broken.
Lady Aviolet, he guessed, had been offended and alienated by Rose’s mention of sex. It was a word that she had hitherto probably only met, and then with reluctance, in literature. She had changed countenance.
The girl Diana, her mouth fallen wide open, had sidled furtively along the floor until she stood beside Ford.