“In the rubber department, Madam, first to the right, second to the left....”
But Mrs. Trenchard hurried through the hot-water bottles in a manner utterly foreign to her.
“Thank you. I’m sure they’re very nice. They won’t leak, you say? How much?... Thank you ... no, I prefer these.... If you’re sure they won’t leak.... Yes, my number is 2157.... Thank you.”
Outside in Victoria Street she said: “I might have given her until quarter to four. I daresay she’s been waiting all this time.”
But Millie for the first time in all their days together was angry with Katherine. She said to herself: “She’s going to forget us all like this now. We aren’t, any of us, going to count for anything. Six months ago she would have died rather than hurt mother....”
And behind her anger with Katherine was anger with herself because she seemed so far away from her mother, because she was at a loss as to the right thing to do, because she had said that she had seen Philip with Katherine. “You silly idiot!” she thought to herself. “Why couldn’t you have kept your mouth shut?”
Mrs. Trenchard spoke no word all the way home.
Katherine was not in the house when they returned. Millie went upstairs, Mrs. Trenchard stared at the desolate drawing-room. The fire was dead, and the room, in spite of its electric light, heavy and dark. Mrs. Trenchard looked at the reflection of her face in the mirror; with both hands she pushed her hat a little, then, with a sudden gesture, took it off, drawing out the pins slowly and staring at it again. Mrs. Trenchard glanced at the clock, and then slowly went out, holding her hat in her hand, advancing with that trailing, half-sleepy movement that was peculiarly hers.
She did then what she had not done for many years: she went to her husband’s study. This hour before tea he always insisted was absolutely his own: no one, on any pretext, was ever to disturb him. To-day, cosily, with a luxurious sense that the whole world had been made for him, and made for him exactly as he liked it, he was, with a lazy pencil, half-writing, half-thinking, making little notes for an essay on William Hazlitt.