Sam could only say that he supposed so, and Anne looked witheringly at him. “Yes, you’re in love all right,” she said. “They say love’s blind. You’re leaving a lot to me.”
“Mother,” he said, alarmed, “what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to get acquainted with Ada,” she said. “One of us must know her, and you don’t.”
“If you’ll be fair to her,” said Sam. “I’m not afraid.”
“I’ll be fair,” said Anne, and meant to be; but is a mother ever fair to the prospective wife of her only son? Perhaps, and in that case Anne went to Ada with an open mind. “After all,” she reflected, “I daresay Tom Branstone’s mother didn’t think much of me, though Tom was one of ten and it makes a difference. It oughtn’t to, though”——she pulled herself up. “Anne, you’ll be fair to the girl.” She looked indulgently at Ada’s curtains and rang Ada’s bell.
But Ada was wearing silver bangles on her wrists and her shoes were made for show. Anne had the sort of pleasure which comes from having one’s worst fears realized. She may have generalized too sweepingly, but she held that only shallow people wear silver bangles and shoes whose aim is daintiness and not durability.
First impressions, at any rate, went heavily against Ada, but Anne remembered her promise to be fair. It was possible that when Tom Branstone took Anne to see his mother, that lady did not like Anne’s way of doing her hair. To each generation the symbols of its youth and perhaps bangles on Ada were not more skittish than a cairngorn brooch had been on Anne.
“I have tea ready, Mrs. Branstone,” said Ada. “Sam told me you were coming.”
“Did he?” Anne was surprised into saying. She had not told Sam of her intention and his guess at it and his warning of Ada had spoilt her plan of coming upon Ada unawares. She wanted Ada unprepared and unadorned: Ada at home, not Ada “at home.” And Ada was very much “at home.” The room had been “turned out”—and so had Peter that it might be—company manners and the company tea-pot were on exhibition, and everything was formal and obviously thought out. And, as Anne had to admit, not badly thought out either. Ada had not been to that expensive boarding school for nothing; she had an air to awe a porter’s widow. Anne didn’t like her trick of putting the milk in the cup before she poured the tea, nor her dogmatic way of asserting that it improved the flavour and that “everybody did it now.” Everybody, did not do it, Anne did not do it; but, again, perhaps this was the modern touch, and Anne had come to be fair.
She made her first score when Ada left the room for hot water. “This room’s been dusted to-day,” thought Anne. “I’ll see what her dusting is worth.” She put it to the test by running her finger along the top of the books on one of the shelves, and her finger was very black.