In spite of the laugh in it, there was a ring in the tone in which the words were spoken which was full of significance, and the significance and the laughter seemed to be doing battle together as Mrs. Romayne went on, ignoring Julian’s interjection:
“I don’t think you would have found it a very pleasant situation, to be engaged to Miss Newton with the prospect before you of keeping her waiting until you had made your fortune at the bar; and I’m sorry to say I don’t share your conviction of the moment, that she is the right young woman. She is very pretty, I allow, and a very nice girl, no doubt.” Mrs. Romayne’s voice grew a little hard as she said the last words. “But she’s not at all the sort of girl that I should like you to marry. She has no money, in the first place.”
“I have enough for both,” said Julian impetuously, and then stopped short and coloured crimson.
His mother broke into a merry laugh.
“No, poor boy!” she said. “I have enough for both! That’s just what I want you to remember in your intercourse with pretty girls. After all, you know, the position has its advantages! You may flirt as much as you like while you’re known to be dependent on your mother, and no one will take you too seriously.”
Julian did not echo her laugh, nor did he make any comment on her words. He sat with his face turned away from her, and a rather strange expression in his eyes—an expression which was at once unformed and mutinous. His mother could not see it, but the outline of his profile apparently disturbed her. The anxiety in her face deepened again, mixed this time with an expression of doubt and self-distrust. As though to emphasize the lightness of her preceding tone, she turned the conversation into a comment on the landscape, and took up her paper again.
The remainder of the journey passed in total silence; and the drive home from the station was silent, too. An arrival in London at the end of September is not a very pleasant proceeding, unless it is approached with considerable industry, determination, and a large stock of energy. The butterflies of society, and, indeed, a large proportion of the bees, have not yet returned. Those who have returned have done so under stern compulsion to begin the winter’s work; and there is a general, all-pervading sentiment as of the end of holidays and the beginning of term time.
The day that had been so radiantly lovely in Norfolk had evidently been oppressively hot and airless in town, and the general air of exhaustion and squalor, which such circumstances are apt to produce in London, did not help to render its appearance more attractive.
Number twenty-two, Queen Anne Street, Chelsea, itself seemed to be touched by the general depression. The summer flowers in the window-boxes had been taken away, and their successors were apparently waiting for orders from the mistress of the house; and as Mrs. Romayne and Julian entered the hall, there was that indefinable atmosphere about the house which two months’ abandonment to even the best of servants is apt to produce—an atmosphere which is the reverse of cheerful. There were letters lying on the hall-table, one of which Mrs. Romayne handed to Julian with the comment: “From Mr. Allardyce, isn’t it, Julian? Will he be ready for you to-morrow?”
Julian’s legal studies were, in fact, to begin in earnest on the following day; and when, the next morning, he said good-bye to his mother and set out for the Temple, she followed him to the door with a laughing “Good speed.” That, at least, was her ostensible motive, but there was something in her face as she laid her hand on his arm as he turned away on the doorstep which suggested that the last words she said to him were those that she had really followed him to say.