"Are you going home, Mark, or will you lunch at the club?"
"The club," said Mark decidedly, with an intonation that brought before Sir Julian's inner vision a lively picture of the probable congealed mutton, underdone potatoes, the lumpy milk-pudding of Sarah's providing, doubtless to be consumed to an accompaniment of senseless comments and enquiries from Ruthie and Ambrose on the engrossing subject of "Why, Ben! A Story of the Sexes." As the thought crossed his mind, Mark observed:
"Iris is coming down here later on. Of course, she wants to be in London for the publication of her novel, but that won't be out till the winter, she says. Poor girl! I wish people would not put it into her head that it is her duty to come and look after me and the children at intervals."
"Who does put it into her head?"
"Various old aunts. I wish people would mind their own business. Poor Iris hates the country."
"Is she still living in the flat?"
"Yes, with another girl. I believe they sleep in the boot-hole and do their own cooking, but it's all a great success, and Iris is very happy, and has the sort of Bohemian society she likes. It is a much better arrangement than her being down here with me. I'm not sure," said Mark thoughtfully, "that I approve of relations living together after they are grown-up."
Sir Julian agreed with him so cordially as to suggest that the case in point was emphatically one in which the proposed arrangement would be eminently undesirable.
"I don't know that Iris, devoted though she is to them, is the best possible person to be with the children."
"No," said Julian, with restraint, considering his private opinion to be that if anything on earth could render Mark Easter's progeny more insufferable than nature and the maternal shortcomings had already made them, it was the society of their affected, suburban, and distinctly underbred young relative. It was a source of continual wonder to him, what sort of a person the second Mrs. Easter could have been, to have presented Mark with such a half-sister as the twenty-year-old perpetrator of "Why, Ben!"