Viola, in a serious moment, threw a light on it. (I had been dining in Edwardes Square on the evening of the day I came back from Canterbury after taking Norah down there.)
"I suppose you don't know," she said, "that Mummy and Daddy fell in love with you first? Well, they did. They wanted you to marry me to keep me out of mischief, but more than anything they wanted you to marry Norah. You see, she's their favourite."
And it seemed there was even more in it than that. They wanted to keep Norah out of mischief too. "Not," she said, "that Norah would ever have run off to Belgium, even with you." But that little adventure of Viola's had made them nervous. Norah was inclined to look down on the garrison; like Viola, she had declared in the most decided manner that she meant to strike out a line for herself; she wasn't going to follow Dorothy's and Gwinny's lead (did I say that the two married sisters lived abroad at their husbands' stations—Gwinny at Gibraltar, and Dorothy at Simla?), and that for lack of originality Mildred's engagement to Charlie Thesiger was "the limit."
"It's a good thing, Wally," she said. "It'll knit us all tighter together. That's partly why we've wanted it so awfully. Do you know that if it hadn't been for you Norah wouldn't have been allowed to come and stay with us?"
I said I was sure she was mistaken. Canon Thesiger—
"Oh," she said, "it wasn't Daddy. He wouldn't have minded. It was Mummy.
She never could bear poor Jimmy."
"But," she went on, "you're his friend. And he worked it for you. They can't get over those two things."
I remember wondering whether deep down in her heart she meant that my marriage would knit her and Jimmy closer?
I wondered whether Jimmy, in his wisdom, had calculated on that, too?
* * * * *