Supposing it were all “off.” Perhaps it might be better; but she knew that she would be disappointed, that she would be sorry. One didn’t get the “real thing” so often in life that one could afford to miss it. No, he mustn’t miss it—oh, he mustn’t miss it. The older she grew, the whiter her hair, the stiffer her stupid bones, the more eagerly, enthusiastically, she longed that every young thing—not only Tony, although he, of course, mattered most—should make the most of its time. They didn’t know, dear people, how quickly the years and the stiffness and the thinning of the blood would come upon them. She wanted them all, all the world under thirty, to romp and live and laugh and even be wicked if they liked! but, only, they must not miss it, they must not miss the wonderful years!
Sir Richard was perfectly silent. He never said more than a word or two, but his immobility seemed to freeze the room. His hands, his head, his eyes never moved; his gaze was fixed on Tony. He was sitting back in his chair, his body inert, limp, but his head raised; it reminded the terrified Mrs. Lawrence of a snake ready to strike.
Mrs. Lawrence found the situation beyond her. She found a good many situations beyond her, because she was the kind of person whom people continually found it convenient to leave out.
Her attempts to force a way in—her weapons were unresting and tangled volubility—always ended in failure; but she was never discouraged, she was not clever enough to see that she had failed.
She was sitting next to Sir Richard, and leant across him to talk to Lady Gale. Mrs. Maradick and Mrs. Lester were sitting on the other side of the table, Maradick talking spasmodically to Lester in the background; Alice and Tony were together at the window.
Maradick had not spoken to Mrs. Lester since their parting on the day before. He was waiting now until her eyes should meet his; he would know then whether he were forgiven. He had spent the morning on the beach with his girls. He had come up to lunch feeling as he usually did after a few hours spent in their company, that they didn’t belong to him at all, that they were somebody else’s; they were polite to him, courteous and stiffly deferential, as they would be to any stranger about whom their mother had spoken to them. Oh! the dreariness of it!
But it amused him, when he thought of it, that they, too, poor innocent creatures, should be playing their unconscious part in the whole game. They were playing it because they helped so decisively to fill in the Epsom atmosphere, or rather the way that he himself was thinking of Epsom—the particular greyness and sordidness and shabbiness of the place and the girls.
He had come up to lunch, therefore, washing his hands of the family. He had other things to think of. The immediate affair, of course, was Tony, but he had had as yet no talk with the boy. There wasn’t very much to say. It had been precisely as he, Maradick, had expected.
Morelli had refused to hear of it and Tony had probably imagined the rest. In the calm light of day things that had looked fantastic and ominous in the dark were clear and straightforward.
After all, Tony was very young and over-confident. Maradick must see the man himself. And so that matter, too, was put aside.