Her speech somehow set him thinking of the fairest face he had ever seen. The picture of that fair face framed in the sunlit hair, with the dark woodwork of the old room for a background, was so vividly before him that it was not surprising his attention wandered from the empty little person at his side, whose flow of frivolous chatter went on uninterruptedly, and covered while it did not disguise the fact that he had grown suddenly dull. Then May appeared unexpectedly from behind some flowering shrubs, and took charge of him and conducted him to the tennis court, where Aplin and another man were playing singles, while Mrs Aplin sat in a rustic summer-house overlooking the court, a self-effacing chaperon, beaming complacently upon the young people, with an indulgent eye lit with maternal pride for her girls. There were no other girls present. As Rosie explained, if they invited too many people they never got any play themselves.
It was all very jolly and homelike, Matheson considered. He played with both girls in turn. May lit a cigarette for him between the sets, and Mrs Aplin fussed over him during tea, and was confidential with him later in regard to her daughters’ tastes and accomplishments and general amiability.
“They are such favourites with every one,” she confided with emphatic earnestness. “A friend whose girls are not popular asked me recently the secret of my training... what plans I adopted in bringing my girls up that made them so generally liked? I told her that I had brought them up to play games.” She regarded Matheson quite seriously, with a gleam of satisfaction in her eyes. “They play games... every game... well. What more is required of a girl? All this nonsense about higher education... It’s so unnecessary. And study is bad for the eyes; it makes girls frown; and a girl with a frown doesn’t look so much studious as bad tempered. Let them play games and look nice; that’s all that is requisite.”
“It’s the sort of idea I started out with,” Matheson returned, beating his tennis boot softly with his racquet and idly watching the pipe-clay rise in little clouds. He laughed suddenly. “I don’t know about looking nice, but I had a fancy for playing games. Life itself seemed a game. But it isn’t. And playing games doesn’t provide one with a banking account.”
“Of course it’s different for men. I don’t advocate games for every one,” she assured him gravely. “But girls don’t need to think about banking accounts.”
“Some of them must,” he said.
She looked at him in surprise.
“I wasn’t speaking of that sort of girl; I meant my own girls,” she answered in a tone that opened up all the social distances before Matheson’s amazed vision.
“I think responsibility unsexes a woman,” she added; and her bewildered listener felt that the final nail had been driven into the coffin containing the discredited remains of the girl-worker’s claim to respectability.
That was the tone of the Rondebosch household; and the head of the house, whose flourishing business made this comfortable despite of everything save leisure possible to his womenkind, showed his appreciation of their views by spending as little time under his roof-tree as was compatible with his position in relation to the family. Matheson had met Mr Aplin only once when he dined at the house. Macfarlane called him morose, but Matheson rather liked the silent, heavy, bored-looking man whose presence his wife and daughters managed to eclipse.