“But, according to your view, that would be a mistake.”
“Not if the man were well off. It is having to cheese-pare that makes the shoe pinch. Marriage has its compensations.” Her gaze rested reflectively on the children. “One grumbles,” she said; “but one wouldn’t undo all of it.”
“I’m never going to marry,” John, aged eight, announced with sturdy determination. “I’ve seen too much of it.”
His mother laughed, and Esmé caught him up and kissed him.
“That’s for you, you stony-hearted little misogynist,” she said, as he struggled to elude her embrace.
“John’s a silly kid,” Mary, his senior by two years, announced in the crushing tones of a person who resents a slight to her sex.
John freed himself from his aunt’s detaining hold in order to vindicate his insulted manhood; and Esmé left them to their scuffling and went upstairs to unpack.
When she came down again her brother-in-law had come home. He sat by the window smoking his pipe, but he rose when she entered and came forward and kissed her. He was a heavily-built, good-looking man, with a boisterous geniality of manner which worried his sister-in-law. Oddly, he never realised her objection. He liked her and laboured under the delusion that she reciprocated his affection. He kissed her heartily.
“Glad to see you back, old girl,” he said, and reseated himself in the only comfortable chair in the room and resumed his pipe. “You look very fit. I told Rose the Zuurberg would set you up; but she won’t hear a good word for it. There isn’t much to do up there, certainly, but loaf around. The drive up, though, is all right. Pretty—isn’t it?”
She laughed, to his puzzled surprise. She often surprised him by the way in which she received his remarks. He had said nothing to cause her merriment. But he preferred smiling faces to glum looks, and so he did not resent it when she laughed at nothing.