"I don't think my choice of clothes has anything to do with Miss
Carson," she answered sharply.
"No, sweetheart, of course it hasn't, really. But I know you'd like to please my mother—and she's not used to these new styles, you see."
He stumbled on awkwardly, then drew her into his arms and kissed her.
"To please me—wear something else," he said. Although unformulated even to himself, Roger's creed was of the old school. He quite honestly believed that a woman's chief object in life was to please her male belongings, and it seemed to him a perfectly good arrangement.
Not to please him, but because she was genuinely anxious to win Lady Gertrude's liking, Nan yielded. Perhaps if she conceded this particular point it would pave the way towards a better understanding.
"Very well," she said, smiling. "That especial frock shan't appear again while I'm down here. But it's a duck of a frock, really, Roger!"—with a feminine sigh of regret.
She was to find, however, as time went on, that there were very many other points over which she would have to accept Lady Gertrude's rulings. Punctuality at meals was regarded at Trenby Hall as one of the laws of the Medes and Persians, and Nan, accustomed to the liberty generally accorded a musician in such matters, failed on more than one occasion to appear at lunch with the promptness expected of her.
In the West Parlour—-a sitting-room which Lady Gertrude herself never used—there was a fairly good piano, and here Nan frequently found refuge, playing her heart out in the welcome solitude the room afforded. Inevitably she would forget the time, remaining entirely oblivious of such mundane things as meals. Then she would be sharply recalled to the fact that she had committed an unforgivable sin by receiving a stately message from Lady Gertrude to the effect that they were waiting lunch for her.
On such occasions Nan sometimes felt that it was almost a physical impossibility to enter that formal dining-room and face the glacial disapproval manifest on Lady Gertrude's face, the quick glance of condolence which Isobel would throw her—and which always somehow filled her with distrust—and the irritability which Roger was scarcely able to conceal.
Roger's annoyance was generally due to the veiled criticism which his mother and cousin contrived to exude prior to her appearance. Nothing definite—an intonation here, a double-edged phrase there—but enough to show him that his future wife fell far short of the standard Lady Gertrude had in mind for her. It nettled him, and accordingly he felt irritated with Nan for giving his mother a fresh opportunity for disapprobation.