LIV
Theodore Raby to Verena Raby
Dear Old V.,—If Josey writes to you for sympathy in her struggle with a stern and heartless parent, please oblige me and help the little idiot (bless her, all the same!) by supporting me.
These are the cold facts. She is eighteen and has been frivolling far too much, largely because she has no mother and I have been too much occupied to attend to her properly. Also because the War made frivolling too easy by fledging so many infants at lightning speed. Among the acquaintances that she has picked up at this and that thé dansant is a flying boy, and, just because other boys and girls have married in haste, she must needs insist on marrying in haste too. No doubt she thinks herself in love and no doubt also he does, although I shouldn’t be surprised to find that he is more pursued than pursuing, as is so often the case now; but the whole thing is derivative really, and I can’t have my one little Precious thrown away on an experiment in imitation.
The bore is that—to such a pass has the world come!—she might at any moment perform the Gretna Green act. Self-restraint, you see, is a little out of fashion up here: we all live for ourselves now, to the great detriment of the Human Family which peace was to consolidate. To forbid her to see the boy seems to me a mistake. If you were well I should ask you to invite her to the country, but you are not well, my poor dear, and she wouldn’t go even if you were—not so long as her warrior is accessible. And he seems to be always in town, the exceptional perils of the air being, it appears, compensated for by exceptional opportunities of leave.
So far as I can gather he is a decent young fellow and he may be on my side—but he doesn’t come and see me and it seems rather absurd to go to see him. The new soldier, and especially when he flies, is not to be found at home too easily! This one seems to be the usual enfranchised public-school boy—to whom the wonders and mysteries of life are either top-hole or incomprehensible, or both, and an eclipse of the sun would be merely a “solar stunt.”
Even if Josey had her foolish way I don’t suppose that the end of the world would arrive, but it would be sad and disappointing and I am certain that she would very quickly regret her impetuosity.—Yours as ever,
Theo.
P.S.—All this about me and mine and nothing of your trouble. Dear old V. I do so hope that you are mending. I must come and see you and the old home soon. It will be a dreadful thought some day—how one postpones these necessary acts!