Johnnie, however, appeared to have his thoughts elsewhere, and Char rather vexedly followed his gaze.
"How I wish my mother wouldn't do this sort of thing!" she said under her breath. "It's most tiring for her, and besides—"
"Besides?" inquired Trevellyan, always courteous, but never of the quickest at catching an inflection.
"I'm afraid I think it infra dig. Darting about with all these girls, when she's capable of such very different sort of work—if only she'd do it!"
"My dear Char, what on earth do you want her to do?" demanded Trevellyan, to whom it came as a shock that any one who was privileged to live near Joanna should think her anything but perfect.
"She is an extremely capable woman of business; why shouldn't she take up some big work for the Government? They are crying out for educated women."
"She couldn't possibly leave your father alone at Plessing."
"She could do a certain amount of work at home even without that. The truth is, Johnnie, that neither she nor my father have realized there's a war on at all. They've no sons out there in the trenches, and it hasn't hit them materially; they've not felt it in any single, smallest way. I shouldn't say it to any one but you, but there are times at Plessing when I could go mad. To hear my father talk on and on about whether some tree on the estate needs cutting or not, just as though on the other side of a little strip of sea—"
She broke off with a shudder that was not altogether histrionic.
"And mother—she wouldn't even knit socks, because it interfered with his billiards in the evenings! I don't understand her, Johnnie. She must know what it all means, yet it's all shoved away in the background. Brucey tells me that she's under standing orders not to discuss the news in the papers at breakfast, and mother won't have a single war-book in the house—not even a war-novel, if she can help it. It's as though they were deliberately trying to blind themselves. I can't understand it."