“I don’t care,” said Rose Aviolet, and laughed defiantly. “I’m rather good at a row.”
The doctor quite believed her. But he did not believe that at Squires there ever would be, any more than there ever had been, a “row.”
IV
Maurice Lucian was entirely right in supposing that there were no such things as “rows” at Squires, but the absence of them was not accepted as a matter of course by Rose Aviolet.
A great deal of her intercourse with her dead mother had consisted in descriptions—perhaps vehement rather than accurate—on Mrs. Smith’s part of “a real old hullabaloo between her and me, and I gave it her straight, I can tell you, with her silly old letter about putting it into the hands of her solicitors if I didn’t pay up then and there,” and on Rose’s part of “Well, Mother, I wasn’t going to stand that from a girl like Esther Moses, needless to say, and I said, Mother, I just said, ‘Yes, you may be very good at arithmetic,’ I said, ‘and good reason why,’ I said, ‘Jewess!’”
Rose and her mother, however indignant, had always rather enjoyed their scenes at the moment of occurrence, and still more in the retrospect.
Scenes with Jim, later on, Rose had enjoyed less, but she had entirely accepted them as part of everyday life, although her pride had not allowed her the satisfaction of retailing them afterwards. At Squires, for the first time in her life, she was in an atmosphere in which scenes could not exist.
To her perceptions, nothing vital could exist at Squires at all, except her own vehement emotions, and these were deprived of the only outlet that she knew—unrestrained speech.
The weeks and even the months slid by in a deadly monotony.
“I’m afraid it’s dull for you, Rose,” said her mother-in-law, after the first anniversary of Rose’s widowhood had passed, and she had discarded as much as she dared of her conventional mourning.