Lady Selina shrugged her shoulders, saying carelessly:
“On ne s’entend pas avec tout le monde.”
Cicely felt as if she had been slapped. It was the first time that her mother had deliberately chosen to indicate the social chasm between herself and a G.P. Cicely, off her guard, said indiscreetly:
“Mother!—Mr. Grimshaw is Brian’s friend. I—I don’t understand.”
Lady Selina may have regretted a slip of the tongue. In her softest voice, she replied:
“My dear child, I have been extremely civil to Brian’s friend. But there are—limits! I regard Dr. Pawley as an exception that proves the rule never broken by my dear father, for example.”
“What rule?”
“I dislike dotting my ‘i’s. However . . . the rule is quite simply this: Solicitors and doctors, by reason of their callings, which impose upon us, willy-nilly, an intimacy of a peculiarly personal and often unpleasant character, must be received with formal courtesy upon occasion. But the fact that they are paid as attendants, so to speak, justifies us in keeping them at a discreet distance. Your grandfather used to say: ‘How can I enjoy my glass of port when my doctor is watching me drink it, after having strictly forbidden it?’ In the same way, although your friend’s father, Sir Nathaniel Tiddle, may be an exceptionally worthy person, I should not care to sit at table with him, because he is a pill-manufacturer. How white the world is this morning!”
Cicely bit her lips in the effort to keep silence. Also, she realised the fatuity of further argument. It seemed to her monstrous that anybody, particularly a mother, should not want to sit at table with a man who had spent a long, wearisome night in attendance upon a croupy child. She said, with an inflection of acerbity:
“Yes; but I always think of snow as Nature’s whitewash.”