"She is very little younger than I was when I married; or than you were yourself, if I may hazard a guess." My mother was silent. She was still silent when Lady Helmstone laid down the law that a girl's best "opportunities" came before she was twenty. In these days of Gaiety girls and American heiresses the whole question had grown incomparably more difficult. "Mothers with a sense of family duty—I may say of patriotism—have to think seriously about these things." She herself, having married off three daughters and two nieces, might be considered something of an expert. Indeed, she was so regarded. She had advised hundreds. There was her cousin Mrs. Monmouth. The Monmouths were not at all well off. "I used to come across Rosamund trailing her three girls about London.... Three! Conceive the indiscretion!—only the young one really caring about balls—the other two going stolidly through with it, season after season. The mother, every year more worn, more haggard—I changed all that! One chaperon will do for a dozen. A group of us took turns. 'Send the youngest to dance,' I said; 'and never more than two at a time.' After all, very little is done at balls!" She spoke impatiently, in a brisk, business-like tone. "As a rule, only boys and ineligibles care about dancing. The thing for people in Rosamund's position to do—I told my cousin, the thing to do was to spend August in London."
There was a pause.
"Do people not leave London in August nowadays?" my mother said, in a tone of perfunctory politeness.
"All the other women leave," said Lady Helmstone, with a rusé significance. "The field is clear. There are always men in London when the town is supposed to be empty. Often Parliament is still sitting. Men have nowhere to go. They accept with gratitude in August an invitation they wouldn't even trouble to answer in June. August is the time. I made Rosamund Monmouth see it. I made her give her common, or garden, cook a holiday. I made her engage a chef—cordon bleu. 'You must give better dinners than men get at their clubs.' She did."
There was another significant pause.
"The least attractive of the Monmouth girls married the rising young barrister Harvey that very autumn. We called him 'Harvest.'" Her laugh rang lonely in the quiet room. "The other is engaged to the member for Durdan. He will be in the Cabinet when our side comes in. Both those girls would be manœuvring for partners at balls still, and their mother would be in her grave, but for...."
The interview ended stiffly.
The only part of my mother's share in it that I regretted was her suggesting that Lady Helmstone should not, after all, let Bettina know there had been any question of her going. "The child is already disturbed enough at the prospect of losing Hermione."
When Lady Helmstone was gone, my mother sat up with flushed cheeks, and said: "If Betty never went anywhere, I should not want her to go away in the care of a woman like that."