The ladies looked, one upon the flowers in the vase, and the other out of the window, in painful expectation of an immediate eclaircissement. But William only nodded a little frown at Trevor, to warn him off the dangerous ground he was treading, and he went on.
“The blame is always thrown on the young fellows; it isn’t fair.” William spoke a little warmly. “It’s the fault of the old ones a great deal oftener, they are so dictatorial and unreasonable, and expect you to have no will or conscience, or body or soul, except as they please. They forget that they were young themselves once, and would not have submitted to it; and then they talk of you as a rebel, by Jove! and a—a parricide almost, for presuming to have either a thought or a scruple, or⸺” On a sudden William perceived that, fired with his subject, he was declaiming a little more vehemently than was usual in drawing-rooms, and his inspiration failed him.
“Hear, hear, hear!” cried Trevor, with a tiny clapping of his hands, and a laugh.
Miss Clara looked all aglow with his eloquence, and her mamma said grandly—
“There’s truth, I’m sorry to say, in your remarks. Heaven knows I’ve suffered enough from unreasonableness, if ever mortal has. Here we sit in shadow of that great ugly, positively ugly tree there, and there it seems it must stand! I daren’t remove it;” and Mrs. Kincton Knox lifted her head and her chin, and looked round like a queen shorn of her regalities, and inviting the indignant sympathy of the well affected. “There is, no question of it, a vast deal of unreasonableness and selfishness among the old. We all feel it,” and she happened to glance upon Miss Clara, who was smiling a little cynically on the snowy ringlets of her little white dog, Bijou. She continued fiercely, “And to return to the subject. I should think no son, who did not wish to kill his father, and to have the world believe so, would think of such a thing.”
“Killing’s a serious business,” observed Trevor.
“A man killed,” observed Mrs. Kincton Knox, “is a man lost to society. His place knows him no more. All his thoughts perish.”
“And they’re not often any great loss,” moralised Trevor.
“Very true!” acquiesced Mrs. Kincton Knox, with alacrity, recollecting how little rational matter her spouse ever contributed to the council board of Kincton. “Still, I maintain, a son would not like to be supposed to have caused the death of his father. That is, unless my views of human nature are much too favourable. What do you think, Mr. Herbert?” and the lady turned her prominent dark eyes with their whites so curiously veined, encouragingly upon the young man.
“I think if I were that fellow,” he replied, and Mrs. Kincton Knox admired his diplomacy, “I should not run the risk.”