“Of course, it’s in abominable taste to discuss my sister-in-law at all—you’re perfectly right. You must forgive me. The fact is, the whole business has got on my nerves, and you know the utter impossibility of discussing any unpleasant situation with my beloved parents. That generation has such a miraculous capacity for evading the unpleasant. As a matter of fact, I’m really in hopes of your giving me some advice about the boy.”
“Your mother told me. Well, get them to allow Cecil to come and have tea with my sister, and play with the live stock, and see the monkey, and that’ll give me a chance of having him under observation for a bit. It’s probably a case of a lively imagination and the company of native servants.”
“No doubt,” agreed Ford politely; “but it’s an unpleasant peculiarity, and one would like to eradicate it before the wretched child goes to school, if only for his own sake. Could you drop me here, Lucian? I want to speak to the farrier fellow.”
The doctor drove off alone with a distinct sensation of relief.
He had known Ford and Jim Aviolet since their babyhood. His relations with both had been more than merely professional, for he had covered the graceless Jim’s tracks on more than one occasion, and Ford, of later years, had taken pains to demonstrate that he was willing to accept Dr. Lucian as intellectual affinity rather than as family physician.
Nevertheless, the doctor, although he had not liked Jim, liked Ford even less.
II
Rose Aviolet came down to breakfast late, and entered the dining-room awkwardly. Even at her utmost self-confidence she did not possess the art of coming into a room, and at Squires she was not self-confident at all.
The dining-room was large and high, with heavy furniture of Spanish mahogany, crimson curtains across the embrasures of the bow-windows and wide, crimson-cushioned sills, and a crimson flock paper against which hung enormous oil-portraits in gilt frames. On the sideboard stood massive silver dishes, engraved with the Aviolet crest, each dish with a little blue flame burning beneath it, and on other, lesser sideboards were respectively placed the apparatus of tea and coffee, and a selection of fruit arranged on a dessert service of intrinsically hideous Crown Derby. A log fire burnt on the open hearth.
Lady Aviolet, squat, grey-haired, dressed in a silk shirt with a high-boned collar, and a black tweed skirt that showed clumping boots below it, was opening a pile of letters with deliberation.