Carrying on the simile, the divorce case seemed to her like a public sale, in which all the blemishes and cracks of her poor jug would be exposed to indifferent observers.
All this she felt very sharply, but at the same time there was an immense relief that never again would Ferdie live under the same roof with her, that she would never again have to listen to his boasting, to hear his plausible, usually agreeable lies, to endure his peevish reproaches when things went wrong. Never again, she told herself with an odd little smile, need she have fried liver for breakfast. Ferdie cherished for fried liver a quite impossible ideal of tenderness and juiciness, and every Sunday morning for a quarter of a century she had come downstairs praying that the liver might be all right this time. And it never was all right. No, she would never have fried liver on her table again.
Then she thought about Paris. Paris, once Guy was out of danger, had been wonderful in its freedom from household cares, its lack of responsibility to anyone. At first she had hardly been able to believe that no one would ask her where she was going, and instantly suggest her not going there, but somewhere else. And then Cannes! One of her favourite literary devices had always been to send the heroines to the Sunny South.
She had written lavishly of the tropical heat, the incredible blueness of the quiet sea, of the wealth of flowers in that vague bepalaced land, but the reality (although the sea was not quite so blue as she had expected it to be) overwhelmed her. The best of all had been the gentle, balmy laziness that gradually wrapped her round and enveloped her, the laziness that even an occasionally sharp, dusty wind could not dispel.
Best of all she had had no duties. Not one. And she had sat on her balcony in a comfortable cane rocking-chair, by the hour. "I just sat, and sat, and sat," she thought, leaning against the window sill. "How beautiful it was." And, now that her regret about her cracked jug had been softened by time, and mitigated by the variety of new joys that had come to her, she could henceforth, in a more decorous British way, go on sitting.
Paul would, of course, continue to bully her and to nag, but if, as she hoped, little Jenny cared enough about him to marry him, he would turn his bullying and nagging attentions, in a very modified way, to her. It was, Mrs. Walbridge reflected innocently, right that a man should give up tormenting his mother once he had a wife of his own. And little red-headed Jenny could, she thought with a smile, look after herself.
As for Mrs. Crichell—once she, too, was Mrs. Ferdie, she would no doubt look after herself. It was a rather startling thought, that of two Mrs. Ferdies! "I suppose I shall be Mrs. Violet?"
The clock on the stairs struck again, and Mrs. Violet started. "Good gracious," she murmured aloud, "how dreadfully late it is."
She looked round the little room once more, recalling the hundreds of hours she had sat there grilling in summer; freezing in winter, working on her books, and then with a queer little smile she went downstairs. She told herself resolutely as she went that this was perfectly ridiculous; that she must go to bed but she didn't want to go to bed, and, moreover, she suddenly realised that she was hungry.
In her excitement she had eaten very little dinner, and after locking the front door she ran down into the kitchen. After a hurried examination of the larder, and experiencing a new and what she felt to be un-British distaste for cold mutton, she decided to scramble some eggs. Lighting the gas-ring, she broke three eggs into a yellow bowl, and began to beat them briskly with a silver fork.