Rose had only two more terms, and as she spent most of the Easter holidays with a school-fellow, she did not meet Ronnie. During the few days she was with me she seemed to be heart-whole; certainly there was no suggestion of blighted affection, for her spirits were of the highest. So Mrs. O’Gorman, I assumed, was right again.
It was just before Rose’s return from school for ever, in the summer, that I had an unexpected visit from Mrs. Stratton, in the character of the solicitous aunt. She arrived in the forenoon, and while doing justice to lunch unfolded her purpose. Briefly it was to renew the attack begun eleven years earlier, only now with perhaps more reasonableness.
My unpardonable offence was still the same—celibacy, but it had assumed an increased gravity. To be a bachelor of thirty-four in charge of a child of seven was deplorable enough; but to be a bachelor of forty-five in charge of a girl of eighteen was heinous. It was thus that her nasty mind worked. And not only hers but, she assured me, countless other persons’. In fact, I gathered from her remarks that the unsuitability of my household was the only theme with which, in a few days’ time, the world would be occupied.
“This morbid interest in my affairs is very disgusting,” I said.
Mrs. Stratton admitted it; but how could I deny that some handle was being given? “You two alone here.”
“Well, I do deny it, absolutely,” I said. “Don’t you all know the conditions of the will? Don’t you know that Rose is in my care until she is twenty—that is to say, for two more years—entrusted to me by her father, to act as a father in his place? It is monstrous to suggest that I am not worthy of that confidence.”
“But I am not suggesting that,” Mrs. Stratton replied indignantly.
“Of course you are,” I said. “The mere fact that you come here and put these ideas into my head is tantamount to a charge, an indictment.”
“I don’t mean that,” she protested.
“It doesn’t matter whether you mean it or not: the effect is the same. By bringing your indecent suspicions here you are hoping to make it impossible for me any more to be natural with this girl.”