Michael tore off his tie and looked resentfully at it at arm’s length. “It is just like the pictures, it seems correct, and it fastens all right with a hook and eye.”
“It is the first time your taste in dress has been questioned, and naturally it pricks,” said Serena smiling at her husband. “It is lucky Jack did not hear it.”
“I don’t know who Jack inherits his slovenliness and his clumsiness from,” said Michael. “Why on earth can’t he sit on his smock without crumpling it. I can. He may be a great intellect, I think he is; he takes after my mother, there is no doubt, but he can’t fold his cloak on his shoulder, he can’t help a woman into her aeroplane, and he is so careless that he can’t alight in London on a roof without coming down either on the sky doorway, or the sky-light. He has broken so many sky-lights and jammed so many roof doors that nowadays he actually goes to ground and sneaks up in the lift.”
Serena was accustomed to these outbursts of irritation. They meant that her nervous, highly strung Michael was perturbed about something else. In this case the something else was not far to seek. He recurred to it at once.
“Will Father ever understand about Jack and Catherine? Will he ever in his extreme old age understand about anything?”
“His mind is still thirty,” said Serena. “The Iceland brain specialist said that as well as Ali Khan, and all the other doctors. That is where they say the danger lies, and where the tragedy lies.”
“But how are we to meet it,” said Michael walking up and down. Presently he stopped in front of his wife and said as one who has solved a problem!
“I think on the whole I had better leave the matter of breaking things to Father entirely in your hands. It will come better from you than from me.”
And the pictures of the various wives of the various ancestors heard once more the familiar phrase, to which their wifely ears had been so well accustomed in their day from the lips of their lords, when anything uncomfortable had to be done.