“It always is here,” said Mrs. Comber, “when there's the slightest opportunity of it.”
“Well, it looks as though there was going to be plenty of opportunity this time,” Isabel said sighing. “It really is too silly. Apparently Archie took Mr. Perrin's umbrella to preparation in Upper School this morning without asking. They hadn't been getting on very well before, and when Mr. Perrin asked for his umbrella and Archie said that he'd taken it, there was a regular fight. The worst of it is that there were lots of people there; and now, of course, it is all over the school, and it will never be left alone as it ought to be.”
“My dear,” said Mrs. Comber, solemnly, “it will be the opportunity for all sorts of things. We 're all just ripe for it. How perfectly absurd of Mr. Perrin! But then he's an ass, and I always said so, and now it only proves it, and I wish he'd never come here. Of course you know that I'm with you, my dear; but I'm afraid that Freddie won't be, because he doesn't like your Archie, and there's no getting over it—and on whose side all the others will be there's no knowing whatever—and indeed I don't like to think of it all.”
She was so serious about it that Isabel at once became serious too. Her worst suspicions about it all were suddenly confirmed, so that the room, instead of its quiet and peace, was filled with a thousand sharp terrors and crawling fears. She was afraid of Mr. Perrin, she was afraid of the crowd of people, she was afraid of all the ill-feeling that promised soon to overwhelm her. She clutched Mrs. Comber's arm.
“Oh!” she cried, “will they hate us?”
“They 'll do their best, my dear,” said that lady solemnly, “to hate somebody.”
II.
And they came, comparatively in their multitudes, to tea on the next afternoon.
Tuesday was, as it happened, Mrs. Comber's day, and the hour's relief that followed its ending scarcely outweighed the six days' terror at its horrible approach. Its disagreeable qualities were, of course, in the first place those of any “at home” whatever—the stilted and sterile fact of being there sacrificially for anyone to trample on in the presence of a delighted audience and a glittering tea-table. But in Mrs. Comber's case there was the additional trouble of “town” and “school” never in the least suiting, although “town” was only a question of local houses like the squire and the clergyman, and they ought to have combined, one would have thought, easily enough.
The society of small provincial towns has been made again and again the jest and mockery of satiric fiction, having, it is considered, in the quality of its conversation a certain tinkling and malicious chatter that is unequaled elsewhere. Far be it from me to describe the conversation of the ladies of Moffatt's in this way—it was a thing of far deeper and graver import.