Even with her mother the girl was like a poker—a cold poker, thought Christopher, who felt he might have forgiven her being a poker if only she had been a red hot one. But how excessively he hated all this, how excessively he hated seeing Catherine in these relationships. Why had she made him come in? Why need he ever have seen Virginia, and been introduced, and have to make the fool grimaces of convention? Well, he would soon have put miles between themselves and Chickover, and he fervently hoped he might never see the beastly place again.
Once more he tucked Catherine in the rug up to her chin. This time she was laughing. The two women on the steps, watching the departure, weren’t laughing. Virginia’s face was expressionless; Mrs. Colquhoun’s had the smile on it of hospitality got down to its dregs—the fixed smile of determination not to relax one hairs-breadth of proper geniality till the door was shut and the guest round the corner. On her son’s behalf, she told herself, she saw his late guest off. Virginia, of course, was doing it on her own behalf, but Mrs. Colquhoun was even more important, for she represented the master of the house. How thankful she was that he wasn’t there to do it himself. What would he have thought of it all?
She put on her eyeglasses in order to see better what was going on down there. The young man, busy with the rug, no longer looked as he had looked in the drawing-room; his face now shone with smiles. So did Mrs. Cumfrit’s. Mrs. Colquhoun could not help being struck by this air of gaiety. And she remembered Mrs. Cumfrit’s yellowness and fatigue on her arrival the previous Sunday, and the way she had remained yellow and had got visibly older all the week, ending up in church that morning by being on the verge either of being sick or fainting—perhaps both. There was no sign of this now. On the contrary, she looked remarkably healthy. Odd; very odd.
‘Oh—good-bye. Good-bye. Now, Mr. Monckton, be very careful, won’t you——’
They were gone. In an instant, it seemed, they were a speck down the avenue, and then the bend hid them, the sound of them died away, and she and Virginia had Chickover to themselves again.
The word harum-scarum entered Mrs. Colquhoun’s mind. She dismissed it. She couldn’t admit a word like that in connection with her Stephen’s mother-in-law.
She looked at Virginia. Virginia was staring straight in front of her at the avenue, at the afternoon sun lying along its emptiness.
‘I do think it good of your dear mother to bother about that young man,’ said Mrs. Colquhoun. ‘Let us hope she will teach him better manners. And now,’ she added briskly, laying an affectionate arm round her daughter-in-law’s shoulder, ‘isn’t it time our little Virginia put her feet up?’
XX
Christopher’s was the slowest motor-cycle on the road that day. At times it proceeded with the leisureliness of a station fly. They loitered along in the sunshine, stopping at the least excuse—a view, an old house, a flock of primroses. They had tea at Salisbury, and examined the Cathedral, and talked gaily of Jude the Obscure, surely the most unfortunate of men, and from him they naturally proceeded to discuss death and disaster, and all very happily, for they were in the precisely opposite mood of the one praised by the poet as sweet, and the sad thoughts evoked by Sarum Close brought pleasant thoughts to their mind.