“Would you like to stop at the church and have a look at the brasses to your grandfather and the rest of them?”
His mother, who had slipped her hand under his arm again, answered:
“No, dear; I've seen them. The church is not at all beautiful. I like the old church at Becket so much better; it is such a pity your great-grandfather was not buried there.”
She had never quite got over the lack of 'niceness' about those ploughs.
Going, as was the habit of Stanley's car, at considerable speed, Felix was not at first certain whether the peculiar little squeezes his arm was getting were due to the bounds of the creature under them or to some cause more closely connected with his mother, and it was not till they shaved a cart at the turning of the Becket drive that it suddenly dawned on him that she was in terror. He discovered it in looking round just as she drew her smile over a spasm of her face and throat. And, leaning out of the car, he said:
“Drive very slowly, Batter; I want to look at the trees.”
A little sigh rewarded him. Since SHE had said nothing, He said nothing, and Clara's words in the hall seemed to him singularly tactless:
“Oh! I meant to have reminded you, Felix, to send the car back and take a fly. I thought you knew that Mother's terrified of motors.” And at his mother's answer:
“Oh! no; I quite enjoyed it, dear,” he thought: 'Bless her heart! She IS a stoic!'
Whether or no to tell her of the 'kick-up at Joyfields' exercised his mind. The question was intricate, for she had not yet been informed that Nedda and Derek were engaged, and Felix did not feel at liberty to forestall the young people. That was their business. On the other hand, she would certainly glean from Clara a garbled understanding of the recent events at Joyfields, if she were not first told of them by himself. And he decided to tell her, with the natural trepidation of one who, living among principles and theories, never quite knew what those, for whom each fact is unrelated to anything else under the moon, were going to think. Frances Freeland, he knew well, kept facts and theories especially unrelated, or, rather, modified her facts to suit her theories, instead of, like Felix, her theories to suit her facts. For example, her instinctive admiration for Church and State, her instinctive theory that they rested on gentility and people who were nice, was never for a moment shaken when she saw a half-starved baby of the slums. Her heart would impel her to pity and feed the poor little baby if she could, but to correlate the creature with millions of other such babies, and those millions with the Church and State, would not occur to her. And if Felix made an attempt to correlate them for her she would look at him and think: 'Dear boy! How good he is! I do wish he wouldn't let that line come in his forehead; it does so spoil it!' And she would say: “Yes, darling, I know, it's very sad; only I'm NOT clever.” And, if a Liberal government chanced to be in power, would add: “Of course, I do think this Government is dreadful. I MUST show you a sermon of the dear Bishop of Walham. I cut it out of the 'Daily Mystery.' He puts things so well—he always has such nice ideas.”