“It is very good of you. I’m afraid you think I’m an ungrateful pig, sometimes——”
Alarm was latent in Lady Aviolet’s grey, obtuse eyes. It crept there, slowly, because all her reactions were slow, but always quite unmistakably, at the introduction of a personal note in conversation. Emotional outbursts, such as Rose was addicted to, she very evidently viewed as indiscretions that only too surely classified their perpetrators.
“My dear—please.... Hark! Can you hear the guns? They must be doing very well.”
“Damn the guns,” said Rose without malice, only resenting her rebuff.
Lady Aviolet slightly drew down her already lengthy upper lip and said nothing whatever.
“I didn’t mean it! It was frightfully rude of me—please forgive me!”
“Don’t, my dear, don’t upset yourself, please. That expression doesn’t sound nice on any one’s lips, but especially not on those of a woman. The use of it is a bad habit, and I’m told it’s very much on the increase—a pity, I think. One knows that no irreverence is intended, but one dislikes hearing such a word at all.”
The fastidious distaste in the elder lady’s voice was quite impersonal, and caused Rose to feel herself relegated to some more than ever remote distance from the world in which the Aviolet standards prevailed.
Her mother-in-law, with deliberate obviousness, changed the subject.
“Ford has probably told you that he is going to talk to Laurence Charlesbury about Hurst, Hugh’s preparatory school. He thinks it might do very well for Cecil, and it would be nice to feel that the little chap would find a friend there. Hugh is a particularly nice boy.”