“Drains? There aren’t any. Mother says open drainage is the best in villages. She knows.”
“Does she?” Once more her eyes seemed to fix themselves inexorably upon Pawley’s pale face. “Does Mother really know, Dr. Pawley? Has she ever taken expert advice, for instance?”
“As to that, my dear child, the fact is we are comfortably antediluvian.”
Cicely digested this, turning troubled orbs from doctor to parson, sensible of tension, and—with the inherited instincts of a fox-hunter—keenly aware that her quarry was escaping. She said with something of her mother’s air of finality:
“Are we? Then the deluge is coming.” In a different voice, charmingly persuasive, she went on: “And now, dear doctor, I want to talk to you about something else of tremendous importance.”
“How you frighten me!”
She smiled at him.
“You’re a rare favourite with Mother. You and—and Mr. Goodrich”—the parson was included as a happy after-thought—“are levers.”
“Levers? Bless me!”
“Yes. I always think of Mother as a sort of fixed star, but you two can move her. And your influence with her is the greater because you hardly ever exercise it.”