I can see her now as she stood there with her brows nearly frowning, her blue eyes looking before her, her mouth almost petulant. “One feels that there are so many things going on—out of one's reach,” she said.
I went back in the motor-car with my mind full of her, the quality of delicate discontent, the suggestion of exile. Even a kind of weakness in her was sympathetic. She told tremendously against her background. She was, I say, like a protesting blue flower upon a cinder heap. It is curious, too, how she connects and mingles with the furious quarrel I had with my uncle that very evening. That came absurdly. Indirectly Margaret was responsible. My mind was running on ideas she had revived and questions she had set clamouring, and quite inadvertently in my attempt to find solutions I talked so as to outrage his profoundest feelings....
7
What a preposterous shindy that was!
I sat with him in the smoking-room, propounding what I considered to be the most indisputable and non-contentious propositions conceivable—until, to my infinite amazement, he exploded and called me a “damned young puppy.”
It was seismic.
“Tremendously interesting time,” I said, “just in the beginning of making a civilisation.”
“Ah!” he said, with an averted face, and nodded, leaning forward over his cigar.
I had not the remotest thought of annoying him.
“Monstrous muddle of things we have got,” I said, “jumbled streets, ugly population, ugly factories—”