“Oh certainly, you are very wise,” Mrs. Carpenter agreed, “though it always seems hard on a husband when he is away a long time. Dear Mamma always insisted on going out to India whatever happened. One of us was even born at sea when the doctor had said that he wouldn’t be responsible for her unless she spent one hot weather at home. However, she was back again that autumn and we were all left with dear Grannie until Papa came home for good.”
“I never think that mothers were so wise in those days as they are now,” said Susie. “One reads of so many little lives sacrificed to theories of that sort. Mothers away, careless nurses and governesses, cold bathing and all sorts of tyrannical rules. They did nobody any good that one can see.”
“Don’t you think that generation were very much stronger, though, than the present one?” asked Mrs. Carpenter. “I do, and I think they were more high principled.”
“Oh no, I don’t think so,” Susie answered in gentle rebuke. “Look at the drinking that went on, for instance. Even gentlemen used to spend their evenings under the table, unable to sit up, and they did just as they liked, and no one dared to say anything. The divorce laws are improving all the time now, though, of course, it is still dreadfully wrong whichever way you look at it. Still, I think people have higher ideals than they did.”
Mrs. Carpenter was completely crushed for the moment. Susie had left no opening for her to score, for modern ideals were her own favourite topic, which she was sometimes unwisely tempted to confuse with the superiority of her own infancy. Susie, though she was by nature always anxious to smooth over all friction between other people, and to establish her own spiritual triumph over sordid dispute, had lately passed through a dangerous crisis, owing to the fact that her own intrigues against her son-in-law might be exposed at any moment by Evangeline’s impatient candour or Mrs. Vachell’s boastful contempt for male authority. It was necessary that she should build for herself a strong pedestal of Courage-to-do-what-is-right-at-all-costs, and she chose to cement it with a plastering of the Best Modern Thought. Once her position was on a solid foundation, she would withdraw again behind her inviolable mist of vagueness. It is easy to imagine how foolish a veiled figure of Mystery would look, toppled over and broken, with nothing left but some meaningless drapery and wire, compared to that of, let us say, Nelson, whose every separate feature and limb would retain its individuality, whether erect above the ground or scattered upon it.
“These strikes are very terrible,” Mrs. Gainsborough remarked, seizing upon the nearest current topic in order to save herself from the perils of controversy into which she might be drawn at any moment. Poor woman! She chose badly.
“It is all very largely the fault of so-called education,” said Mrs. Carpenter, pulling herself together for a new line of self-assertion. “They insist on everybody being taught to read, and send working-men to the Universities, and then are surprised that they read the wrong things. Of course they read whatever is sensational, just as our maids prefer trashy novels about peers marrying housemaids, and they won’t look at the classics. All that the strikers want is gramophones and pianos that they can’t play and motors to go to work in instead of trams. They are far better paid than our wretched clergy, for instance. I looked in on little Jenny Abel the other day, and found her and the children having tea with nothing but bread and a scraping of margarine, and all of them with colds, and Jenny simply worn out with doing all the housework and the cooking. The small girl they had had gone off to a place where she was getting £35 a year; more than Jenny has to dress herself and all the children. The girl’s mother took her away because she said she wasn’t properly fed and had too much to do. Said she shouldn’t touch margarine. ‘Nasty poor stuff, I call it!’ she said; and the girl must have butter and jam and something hot for supper and every afternoon off from three to six and two evenings a week out until ten.”
“But I really don’t think you would find those sort of girls very much educated,” said Mrs. Gainsborough nervously. “They are not the kind who take scholarships. They are, in a way, more like some of the girls one meets about in society just now; selfish, you know, thinking of nothing but amusing themselves.”
“I don’t know at all where you meet such girls, dear lady,” Mrs. Carpenter answered rather acidly. “All my friends’ daughters whom I can think of are taking up professions.”
“Yes, but rather for the fun of it, don’t you think?” poor Mrs. Gainsborough suggested, plunging more and more wildly. “They don’t like to be worried by home life and they prefer working with men and so on. It is very natural, poor young things. Just what I should have done myself if I had been born later.”