“I should have thought she would have been better employed in her own home, that she would have been wiser to leave these difficult subjects, especially the White Slave Traffic—to men.”
“They had been left to men for a long time,” said Serena.
The day came when he was wheeled out into the garden in the old mahogany wheel chair which his father had used in the last years of his life.
Serena was sitting beside him. When was she not beside him! Michael, at a little distance, was talking to two of the gardeners.
“Why do Michael and the gardeners wear smock frocks and blue stockings?”
“It is so comfortable for one thing, and for another it is the old national peasant dress. We naturally all wish to be dressed alike nowadays, at any rate when we are in the country, just as the Scotch have always done.”
“I remember,” said John, “when I was a small child a splendid old man of ninety, Richard Hallmark, who used to come to church in a smock frock and blue worsted stockings and a tall black hat. His grown-up grandsons in bowler hats and ill-made coats and trousers looked contemptible beside him, but I believe they were ashamed of him.”
His dim eyes scanned the familiar lawns and terraces of the gardens that had once been his, and the wide pasture lands beyond.
It was all as it had been in his day. Nevertheless he seemed to miss something.