“Oh, you are kind! I am glad I’ve seen you,” she cried suddenly. “I’ve been so wretched about the whole thing, and not known what to do. They—my husband’s people—are determined that Ces ought to go through the usual mill—preparatory school, public school, university, and the rest of it. And I’m dead against it. At least I was. But I’m not so sure now about the preparatory school.”
Mrs. Lambert smiled. “Why not try it, as an experiment, and see how it answers before you decide about the rest?”
“That’s just what a great friend of mine said—Lord Charlesbury. You’ve got his boy here, and you know him, don’t you?”
“Yes, he’s charming, isn’t he? So is the boy.”
Easily enough, the schoolmaster’s wife shifted the conversation to less personal topics, Rose obediently following her lead.
They said not another word in direct relation to little Cecil until the moment when Rose and Miss Lucian went away.
Then Mrs. Aviolet squeezed the hand of her hostess in her strong, enveloping grasp and murmured haltingly:
“If he does go anywhere, it’ll be here. I simply can’t tell you what a relief it’s been, seeing you. I hadn’t any idea that you’d be so—human!”
Rose laughed slightly as she said it, with an apologetic note in her laughter, but her brown eyes were oddly misted over. Afterwards she said to Henrietta Lucian:
“I liked that woman—awfully. You don’t know how encouraging she was about Ces. So different to that fool of a Ford, talking about Ces being bullied into telling the truth and kicked into line. I tell you, Ford makes me sick.”