“Oh, no.” She shook her head regretfully. “That idea’s extinct as the dodo. Antiquated, Philip—very.”
He glared at her ferociously.
“Worth more than half your modern ideas put together,” he retorted. “Women, don’t know their duty nowadays. If they’d get married and have babies and keep house in the good, old-fashioned way, instead of trying to be doctors and barristers and the Lord knows what, the world would be a lot better off. A good wife makes a good man—and that’s job enough for any woman.”
“I should think it might be,” agreed Lady Susan meditatively. “But it sounds a trifle feeble, doesn’t it? I mean, on the part of the good man. It’s making a sort of lean-to greenhouse of him, isn’t it?”
“You’re outrageous, Susan! I’m not a ‘lean-to’ anything, but do you suppose I’d be the bad-tempered old ruffian I am—at least, you say I am—if you’d married me thirty years ago?”
“Twenty times worse, probably,” she replied promptly. “Because, like most wives, I should have spoiled you.”
Sir Philip looked out of the window.
“I’ve missed that spoiling, Susan,” he said. Once again that incongruous little note of wistfulness sounded in his voice. But, an instant later, Lady Susan wondered if her ears had deceived her, for he swung round and snapped out in his usual hectoring manner: “Then you won’t help me in this?”
“Help you to marry off Ann to Tony? No, I won’t. For one thing, I don’t want to spare her. And if ever I have to, it’s going to be to some one who’ll look after her—and take jolly good care of her, too!”
“Obstinate woman! Well—well”—irritably. “What am I to do, then?”