‘It is,’ agreed the seer. ‘But it’s knowledge anyone can share who will try to understand.’
From the field they were passing Fairfield’s Hygienic Corsets blazed in letters of red above the hedge. The factory chimneys blotted out the horizon.
Hypatia’s father was a spare, bullet-headed man with mutton-chop whiskers of a sandy hue and an indomitable nose that he had followed faithfully per aspera ad astra. The stars of Mr. Fairfield’s attainment were commercial prosperity and for his son the education that he himself had been denied. It became more and more apparent to Sheila, during that drive from the station, that for Hypatia’s parents Edward, the firstborn, was the being round whom the world revolved. For him the sun shone and the little stars clapped their hands. Fairfield senior, at first indifferent to Edward, had been trained in son-worship by his wife. Behind a brusqueness that passed for eccentric humour Mrs. Fairfield concealed power. Worshipping her son, for his advancement she had used her husband unsparingly, guiding his energy consistently in the direction of most commercial gain, and curbing his desire to spend himself, a prophet in the wilderness, in fruitless public advocacy of freethought. Her subjugation of her husband, himself a being of great though erratic energy, was the gradual achievement of twenty-five years.
‘Well, Miss Dyrle,’ said Hypatia’s father briskly. ‘Here you are again! We’re glad to see you. You know that.’
He looked at Sheila kindly, but as if to say: ‘Deny it if you can.’
‘Ah,’ he added, ‘here’s my wife. The honoured guest’s arrived, me dear, and I’m just extending to her, in the name of the family, a hearty welcome.’
The arrival of Mrs. Fairfield displaced a lot of air.
‘Now this is a treat,’ she said, holding out both her hands. ‘My dear Sheila! I may still call you Sheila, mayn’t I? You are so often in our thoughts!’
Sheila murmured her pleasure.